Full text of "America and the league of nations; addresses in Europe, Woodrow Wilson"

See other formats

UC-NRLF

^ IROUGH LITER^i

AAdERIOV

AND THE

LEAGlIE°/NATIO

y\lDRE55ES IN EUROP
WOODROW WIUOI

f,J»R^#

POWELL-HODGIN5

Digitized by the Internet Archive

in 2008 with funding from

IVIicrosoft Corporation

http://www.archive.org/details/americaleagueofnOOpowerich

Copyriohi by Clinedinst

WooDROW Wilson

PATRIOTISM THROUGH LITERATURE

AMERICA AND THE
LEAGUE o/ NATIONS

ADDRESSES IN EUROPE

WOODROW WILSON

Compiled by

LYMAN P. POWELL

and"

FRED B. HODGINS

RAND McNALLY AND COMPANY

CHICAGO NEW YORK

• •••,•• •

• • • • •• • •

• • • •, • • •

• .• • •.•• •,•• t • • • • ••• •

•• • • ••

^-^

<\^

THE CONTENTS

PAGE

The Itinerary viii

Thirty-two Full-Page Pictures Illustrating the Presi-
dent's Progress through Europe .... .3-34
Why Woodrow Wilson Went to Europe . . . .37
Official Announcement of the President's Intention

TO Visit Europe 61

The President's Message to Congress .... 62

The Voyage Begins 64

On the High Seas 65

Arrival at Brest 6s

Brest: Address of Welcome 66

Paris: Luncheon at the Elysee Palace .... 67

Reply by President Wilson 70

Paris:

Reply to Socialist Delegation 72

A Citizen of Paris 73

At the Sorbonne 75

Chaumont:

Welcome by General Pershing 78

Address to the American Troops 78

Paris:

Christmas Message from Paris 81

London:

Welcome to London 82

Reply by President Wilson 84

His Greatest Birthday 86

To the League of Nations' L^nion . . . .87

To THE Council of Free Churches . . . . ^2>

At the Guildhall 88

At the Mansion House ....... 92

4 0 6 S u •

vi THE CONTENTS

PAGE

Carlisle:

Visits His Mother's Home . . . . . -94

Manchester:

In the Free Trade Hall 97

At the Midland Hotel loi

The Eternal City:

At the Quirinal Palace 104

Reply by President Wilson 106

In the Chamber of Deputies 108

To Italian. Journalists 11 1

At the Municipal Palace .112

Milan:

On His Arrival .114

To Italian Mothers and Widows 115

At the Royal Palace 115

To THE Committee of Entertainment . . . .116

A Citizen of Milan 117

From La Scala Balcony .118

To THE Milanese Public 119

Genoa:

At the Mazzini Monument 120

Gift of Mazzini's Works 121

At the Columbus Statue 122

Turin:

The Guest of the City 123

At the University . 126

Paris:

The Peace Conference Opens 128

Address by President Poincare 128

Nominates M. Clemenceau 136

Mr. Lloyd George Seconds Nomination 138

M. Clemenceau's Reply 140

To the French Senate 142

The League of Nations 146

THE CONTENTS vii

PAGE

To THE Chamber of Deputies 152

A Return Visit Promised 158

The Covenant of the League of Nations . .160
Au Revoir 169

Home Again:

At Boston 170

At New York 181

Appendix:

The Fourteen Points 197

Constitution of the League of Nations . . .199

THE ITINERARY

1918

November 18 Announces intention to visit Europe.

29 Announces names of American Peace dele-
gates.

December 3 Addresses Congress.

3 Leaves Washington.

4 Embarks at Hoboken on the "George

Washington" and sails for France.
4-13 At sea.

13 Arrives at Brest and proceeds to Paris.
13 Arrives at Paris.
13-24 In Paris.

25 Spends Christmas with American troops at

Chaumont. Sends greetings to American
people.

26 Arrives at London.

28 His sixty-second birthday.

29 Visits mother's home and speaks in grand-

father's church at Carlisle.

30 Visits Manchester, makes two addresses.

1919
January

February 3
14

March

3 Arrives at Rome.
3-5 In Rome.

6 Visits Milan, Genoa, and Turin.

7 Back in Paris.

18 Formal opening of the Peace Conference.
25 Addresses Conference on the League of
Nations.
To the Chamber of Deputies.
The World League plan is presented to the

Conference.
The President embarks on the ''George
Washington" for horfte.
25 The President in Boston.
25 Returning to Washington.

4 The President in New York.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Jefferson, Lincoln, and Wilson are preeminent among American
Presidents for their art of literary expression. President Wilson is
here shown writing a message to Congress.

After getting his sea legs the President is keenly interested in every
detail of life on the "George Washington," and he is here seen, binoc-
ulars in hand, watching, like Columbus, for a sight of land. At the
left is Captain McCauley; at the right, Rear Admiral Grayson.

HO, DAY j nut f^U^BER Af^D mARlcs Of

SPoTt of l3^ocrl<$>^fi,

N9 1466 [DUPHCATE.l

Copj/ri'ufit JtttcrrtatinnnJ Film Sir

As the "George Washington" sails eastward, President and Mrs.
Wilson send back by carrier pigeon this letter of appreciation to Rear
Admiral Gleaves, who was responsible for their comfort and safety.

'^^

IR ^^^„ ;"; 'C 'f^"'*'?' "«# • If #^jK3|L<|i|» '^iBlB^ " "" '^

^'^ '

'^ ^ ^M '\ ™ ■ -•* ^ : .-^JHBB ■

/•^p?

<■ V* >!^=-^v

Paris welcomes the President on the magnificent boulevard in front
of the Grand Palais.

F-. ^ . ^ ^ . , .^ f-^ J

Copyrioht International Film Service

The President attends the American Church his first Sunday in
Paris.

Why do the French love our boys? One of our jolly marines is
playing humpty-dumpty for two French kiddies who had almost for-
gotten how to play before our boys arrived.

_t o

■^

j^H

^ 1

[' --"i

^^■1

H-^^^fl

^^^H

bt^

^^^B ^'

■H^^n

■H

^^^^^^B \

■

They^meet

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho' they come from the ends
of the earth.

Between stout British troopers the President approaches the Guild-
hall in London under "The Star-Spangled Banner, long may it wave."

:,^^#^-

V-

Jii^'IP''

•«»V

0) > 4J _r

'»-*_ ^3 h ^

r g 5

coil's
S g c< .

^ i^ - c ^

w 5 O

r ' *

/.;;... '•;,•.'•;

Woodrow Wilson's response to the welcome at Manchester.

national Film Service

In Lowther Street Church, Carlisle, where the Reverend Thomas
Woodrow, grandfather of the President, once preached, his namesake
spoke in December. It is noteworthy that the President was named
in full for his grandfather, but dropped the "Thomas" years ago.

t'opyriaht International Film Service

One member of his grandfather's Bible class, Thomas Watson, sur-
vived to greet the President at the age of ninety.

mm--.

*: i^ .

t ^ 4

Rome, the Eternal, at last welcomes an American Executive. He
speaks to the applauding mass from the balcony of the Royal Palace.

Covvriaht International Film Service

The Mayor of Rome presents to Mrs. Wilson the Gold Wolf,
reminder of the days of Romulus and Remus.

Woodrovv Wilson, bringing flowers to the Forum, recalls the days
when he was a student at Princeton and Johns Hopkins and the name
of the Forum was often on his lips as the inspiration to effective public
speaking, in which he now ranks with the greatest of all time.

Copyi iuhL IiUtrn

The Coliseum calls up rich memories to such an authority in world
history as Woodrow Wilson, whose face here carries the impression the
experience makes.

The President with the King of Italy, whose service to his country
has been as important as it has been democratic.

• r r • I

The arrival of the President at Milan.

Copyrigh* International Film Service

The King of Prussia was crowned Emperor of Germany in the Hall
of Mirrors at Versailles on January 19, 1871.

- c c c c

On January 19, 1919; another group was gathering on the same spot
to make the world safe for democracy. Lloyd George and General
Pershing are in the foreground.

INTRODUCTION

Un,'v

AMERICA AND THE
LEAGUE OF NATIONS

WHY WOODROW WILSON WENT TO EUROPE

THE TWO GREAT DAYS

November ii, 19 18, and January 25, 19 19, will forever
stand together in the memory of man. If the Armistice
ended war, on November 11, the President's speech at the
second session of the Peace Conference, on January 25,
assured peace to the world. Like a crusader, Woodrow
Wilson spoke of the incomparable moral adventure which
the Conference was making and declared the world a place
perfectible.

After him England, France, Italy, Australia, Poland,
and China expressed approval and agreed that a League of
Nations must be an integral part of peace and open to all
nations worthy of world confidence. Then a committee
was empowered to ' ' work out the details of the constitution
and functions of the League," and the President of the
United States was made chairman. Thus was born at a
precise moment a League of Nations, and the principle of
lasting peace was agreed upon in circumstances no one con-
versant with the record of the world's conventions will be
inclined to doubt.

A BACKWARD LOOK

Now we can begin to look back on the past with perspec-
tive. Austria precipitated the war by her impossible note
to Serbia. But the German government stood back of
Austria, chose the moment for the declaration, and staged
the most colossal calamity of all time.

^Jl v'c America ^^ AND the league of nations

The roots of war, however, strike deeper down than the
unexpected events following the shot fired at Sarajevo.
Far back in 1648 the Congress of Westphalia tried in vain to
satisfy both Catholic and Protestant. The Revocation of
the Edict of Nantes followed, however, even while some
members of that congress were still living. Progress was
made at Utrecht in 17 14, but the iniquitous slave trade was
simply transferred from Spain discredited to England tri-
umphant, and the exploitation of the negro is still pursued,
especially in Africa.

The Congress of Vienna met in 18 14 to punish France
and hastily adjourned to escape Napoleon back from Elba
to fight his Waterloo. The Congress had been animated by
the honorable purpose both of settling immediate difficulties
and of creating a world order no cataclysm could upset.
But Talleyrand, cleverest of diplomatists of the old school,
was playing off against each other in the interest of France
the factions into which the Congress had been broken.
The results in consequence were chiefly futile, and the only
world order there established was quickly prostituted to
the uses in 1823 of that so-called Holy Alliance, which bol-
stered up the thrones that tottc red and created new ones
where it could.

A PARLOUS STATE

From 181 5 to the Franco-Prussian War the world was in
a parlous state, save over here where the Monroe Doctrine
was announced in 1823, virtually absolving America from
all responsibility for Europe, and in addition warning Europe
from all interference in the Western Hemisphere, particu-
larly south of the Rio Grande.

Year after year the story was the same. England,
France, Prussia, Austria, Russia, thought they had put all
Europe in its proper place and that Europe would stay put.

WHY WOODROW WILSON WENT TO EUROPE 39

Canning summed the situation up in the sentence: ''Every
nation for itself, and God for us all." But God is never for
us all when we are for ourselves, and there is always — in the
homely phrase — a hindmost which the devil gets and uses
to make trouble for the rest.

Two movements were perceptible to those who had the
eyes to see. In England and in France democracy was
making rapid headway, and now and then convulsive exhi-
bitions of it were furnished even in the Czar's domain. To
be sure, England was as usual pursuing a policy of self-
promotion, but the democratic spirit was growing steadily
on both sides of the channel, and — as Professor Cestre of
the Sorbonne testifies — England was lending all encourage-
ment to real democracy wherever it appeared.

Prussia's course was different. She pretended much.
She conceded little. In the Revolution of 1848, which
promised things worth having, she lost many of her finest
spirits to America. Bismarck, bent on elevating Prussia to
the premiership in Central Europe, was gathering the reins
into his hard fists. He lured Austria to help him steal
Schleswig-Holstein, and two years later, in 1866, with the
help of the new needle gun at Sadowa, he cleared the way
for war with France in 1870 and for crowning in the Hall
of Mirrors at Versailles on January 19, 187 1, the King of
Prussia Emperor of all the German states.

THE OLD DIPLOMACY

There was a Paris Conference in 1856 to end the War in
the Crimea, but it was under the spell of the Mettemich
diplomacy. It made no contribution to democracy. It
failed abjectly to secure stability for Europe, and in the
twenty years that followed, war succeeded war so swiftly
that when the Congress of Berlin met in 1878 the Russians

40 ■ AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS .

were camping in plain view of Constantinople, Turkey
retained but a slippery foothold in Europe, and the Balkan
peninsula was so divided as to give Bulgaria a chance to
enter on an inglorious career of mischief-making for the
world.

Had Bismarck, Beaconsfield, and their companions
of the Congress had a bigger vision for the Balkans and
Armenia, the recent war need never have occurred. But
the little good accomplished through the Peace of San
Stefano earlier in the year was rudely undone. The greater
powers represented at the Berlin Congress thought the
thoughts of selfishness and spoke the words of greed. The
smaller nation, whose right to be has been at last established
in this recent war, was trampled under diplomatic feet.
The hurt already done to millions was not healed. Even
Christian peoples, whom the Mohammedan was pledged
by the very terms of his faith to treat as **dogs," were
handed back to Turkey. The train was laid for the out-
break in the Balkans and for the ravishment and ruin of
the whole Near East.

The delegates adjourned with ''one auspicious and one
dropping eye" for one another. The ''armed peace" fol-
lowed, with Europe divided into groups, each building up
its army or its navy, Germany both; and all Europe was
driven on toward a general war which had to come without
a change of heart none could expect in such a situation.

THE GERMAN POLICY

For while England and France and Italy were develop-
ing a real democracy, and even Russia called the first
Hague Conference in 1899 to insure the world against the
fire men whispered in their sleeves might break out any
time, Germany was gathering the fruits of international

WHY WOODROW WILSON WENT TO EUROPE 41

unrelatedness into her imperial storehouse of autocracy.
Her amazing and glittering success, turned to the discredit
of all democratic .aspirations, was expressed in the phrase
** intelligent monarchy," which the Kaiser and the Potsdam
Gang were fond of using and of reinforcing with old-age
pensions, accident insurance, and ordered life flung down
from above to ordinary people like the ''bread and cir-
cuses" of Roman Kaiserism.

France, wounded to the heart by the loss of Alsace-
Lorraine, was in recent years endeavoring with character-
istic adaptability to get used to her heart hurt. But it is
doubtful that Germany ever thought a second time about
the matter, except to attach to herself, as closely as a thief
could, the stolen provinces. Prussian liberals sometimes
demanded true parliamentary government in place of the
camouflage of military glory and pan-Germanic dreaming.
When Social Democrats became a force with which to reckon
a few years ago, Der Tag, for which the Junkers long had
planned and of which they loved to boast, was hurried
forward, and in July, 19 14, deliberately ushered in.

DER TAG

The only wonder is that Great Britain, France, and the
United States could have been so long deceived. Our
friends across the seas, still somewhat enmeshed in an
antique diplomacy, could not think that war would really
come. When Der Tag actually dawned, they stood bewil-
dered, stunned, incredulous. For days and days in England
people could not for the life of them believe that war had
really come. On August 9, 19 14, when England was
already in her second week of the great war, an American
attending Sunday morning service in a small English city
heard no reference in sermon or in prayer to the supreme

42 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

event. No patriotic hymn was sung. The pastor made
appeal instead for a small mission down in Africa. It
was evident that no one present seriously thought of war.
It was only in fact in the great university centers, always
in ages past first to respond to their country's call, that
the situation was immediately accepted.

The years go fast in Oxford,
The golden years and gay,
The hoary Colleges look down
On careless boys at play.
But when the bugles sounded war
They put their games away.

CAUGHT UNPREPARED

Over here the situation was not visualized. The news-
papers had good *'copy." Magazines hurried off their
special writers to^ the battle scene. There was a flurry in
Wall Street. We all began to read Bemhardi and von
Treitschke with increasing certainty that some men in the
world were mad, at least "North North West." Militarism
had gone to the head of Central Etirope. But we were
three thousand miles away, and the war at first was but
another of the many wars it was our duty to avoid. Men
like Major Putnam and James M. Beck were our Paul
Reveres, calling us at once to arms. Others, obsessed by
abstract admiration of German methods in education,
trade, and industry, were half confident that German
efficiency again would win. Some were really pro-German,
and a reading of their printed utterances in the fall of 19 14
justifies the distrust many felt in them.

WE LOOKED FOR LEADERSHIP

We all looked to the White House. We knew our Presi-
dent's temperament, training, encyclopedic knowledge, and
opportunities for inside information. We trusted him to

WHY WOODROW WILSON WENT TO EUROPE 43

tell us what to do. When he announced his policy of
neutrality, and even bade us to be neutral in our thoughts,
many of us tried, with what now seems to be pathetic con-
fidence, to follow his directions. Men successful in business
and the professions knew that when the great crisis comes
victories are not won by debating societies but by leader-
ship. We therefore heeded Woodrow Wilson. Never has
the head of any nation received a more unquestioning
support. Even Colonel Roosevelt, at the very first, played
the game according to the rules prescribed by the
government. Journals like the Outlook in that first,
fatal autumn, while maintaining editorial independence,
published articles on either side of the question that no
one might be doubtful of their fairness. The Review of
Reviews, though in September, 19 14, roundly scoring the
invasion of Belgium, accepted the policy of neutrality,
insisting until the last, however, that neutrality be enforced
to the utmost, confident — as ** constant reader" knows —
that positive and peremptory neutrality would either end
the war aright in a short time or take us in on the right
side.

A CRYSTALLIZING CONSCIENCE

Everybody knows how public sentiment rapidly and
steadily crystallized around the Allied Cause, how we
gave moral and financial aid to those we now all know were
fighting our own war as well as theirs, how our boys by the
thousands were drifting into Canada, England, France, to
mingle their life blood under the Union Jack or under the
Tricolor with the soil of la belle France.

With the sinking of the "Lusitania" came a quickening
of public conscience. Good Americans and true began to
realize that German propagandists were doing their foul

44 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

work with some effect among our people. Here and there
were poison spots where men seemed sure that Germany
was invincible. Behind veiled eyes and lips sealed except
to double dealing, like the scientific scholars they had been
taught in Germany or by German teachers to adore, they
bulked far bigger in public estimation than was their desert.
They brought us all concern.

The election of 191 6 unhappily injected politics into the
situation. **He kept us out of war" became the campaign
cry on one side, while on the other there was manifest
reluctance to announce a program different and more con-
structive than the President's had been. But by that time
the number urging us to war was steadily growing, and
national participation in the war was increasingly discussed.

THE IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT

The election over, the President began to ask Allies and
Central Powers,- too, some searching questions. Notes
were interchanged. The submarine campaign was soon
renewed. Von Bernstorf was sent home. On April 2, 191 7,
the President put the case to Congress, and four days later
we were in the war. We were not prepared. The goose-
step was unknown to us. We set ourselves in various
ways to learn the quickstep. Slowly at first our soldiers
drifted over. Then, as everybody realized that Germany
was making ready for the Western drive last March, the
cry of *' hurry up" went forth. In every state in our great
land the patriotic impulse found expression, and Washington
took notice.

Soon the British for a proper compensation loaned us
transports, while the French also did their full share. By
July we had more than a million in the battle line. The
Marines swept everything before them at Chateau-Thierry,

WHY WOODROW WILSON WENT TO EUROPE 45

in spite of the resistance offered by the Prussian Guard.
Pershing^s men in one day straightened out that saHent
at St. Mihiel which, with Metz impregnable so near at
hand, had been regarded as a doubtful task of many weeks.
Young, fresh, unwearied, jocular, fascinatingly impudent,
eager to obey any order except the order to retreat, our
boys came in so strong and fought so hard as to put into
the weary British, French, and Italian hearts new confidence
in themselves and for us a love which will not let us go in
all the years to come if we but half deserve to hold it.

THE COLLAPSE OF THE FOE

Foch, Generalissimo of all the forces beating at the
Central Powers, hammered rapidly, simultaneously, irre-
sistibly, on every front. Der Tag had come, but it was
for Germany the day of doom. Her army found itself
outclassed by forces with resources back of them no Junker
could persuade the German people were less than inexhaust-
ible. The final notes were written. The Armistice was
signed at the headquarters of the Generalissimo on Novem-
ber II. The German fleet ceased to paddle up and down
the Kiel Canal, sailed over on November 21 to the Firth
of Forth, surrendered — amazing spectacle in history — to a
foe they feared to fight, and

I wonder what Cervera thought
When, to the wide and silent sea.
That dull November morning brought
The broken fleet of Germany: —
Those dumb grey hulks that never knew
The glory of a hope forlorn,
Whose long dishonored banners flew
Only to feel their foemen's scorn. 1

1 Quoted from The Outlook, November 21, 1918. Written by Harold
Trowbridge Pulsifer.

46 . AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS
SETTLING DOWN TO PEACE

Meanwhile the American people, with the worst war of
all time brought to an end, reacted as peace-loving people
always do. We had never wished to fight. We went into
the war because it was no longer possible both to keep out
and keep our self-respect. After November ii we wanted
our boys home. They could fight — as the ''Blue Devils"
testified — like devils, when there was fighting to be done;
but in fighting for its own sake they had no interest, and
when the war was over their thoughts turned home again.
We, as well as they, had made a record in the circumstances
unsturpassed by any nation in the history of the world.
When the dove of peace alighted out of a German auto-
mobile at the headquarters of General Foch, we were
launching two ships a day and filling the air with fighting
planes. In ten months we had turned a three-hundred-acre
farm near Baltimore into the largest poison factory ever built.
We were making two hundred tons of toxic gases every
day to drop upon the Germans, mostly from the air, while
at the utmost they could make but fifty tons a day. With
our usual disregard of cost and of conventionality, we had
flung ourselves into the war with all our economic, moral,
and military strength, and that exceeded every expectation.
Like Milton's strong man wakened out of sleep, Uncle
Sam had risen in his might and shaken his invincible locks.
But for fighting we had no stomach after war was done.
We wanted to be led into the paths of peace.

THE PROBLEMS WHICH PEACE BROUGHT

The problems of demobilization — grave, massive, impon-
derable— began at once to challenge our attention. We
had drifted into war; we had no wish to drift back into
peace. Every nation in Europe, even under the utmost

WHY WOODROW WILSON WENT TO EUROPE 47

strain of war, had been getting ready for its reconstruction.
Great Britain had as many as thirty-seven organizations
in active operation the month peace came, to deal with
the problems following the war. Before November ended,
our own problems grew immense and complicated. Sol-
diers mustered out were turning up ''dead broke" in many
of our cities because they had not had advance of pay.
Organized labor warned us that wages must, and would,
not fall, though the cost of living still kept up, to the anxiety
of the plain people.

The parson and the parson's wife
And mostly married people,

who had no union to speak for them.

The, cry for labor spent itself as men and women engaged
in public service quickly made connection with private
business. Farm workers were not wanted until the spring.
Money was high. Credit was shy. Manufacturers ceased
to turn out munitions, and many factories stood idle. The
grafter had been with us long; now we had to reckon with
the profiteer as well. The loafer, like the poor, is with
us always; now the slacker had come on to share his place
and add to our distress. We hoped we would be better
as a people; all through those November days we feared
we might be worse. Jostled, disturbed, and bruised by
war, more than a hundred million people wanted when the
Armistice was signed a little time to find out whether the
blood oozing from their skin was healthy or unwholesome.

In the exigencies of war, the government had taken
over, without serious protest from the people, railroads, tele-
phones, telegraphs, and shipping. The output of our mines
and factories was under governmental oversight, and we
were told what we should eat and how much coal we might
expect to burn. Russia had been overcome by Bolshevism.

48 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

The tide was reaching out through Germany, Austria, Italy,
and Sweden toward France and England, and we were
wondering whether it would lap our shores. Reactionaries
as usual were hiding their heads in the sand, or crying,
"Lo, here" and ''Lo, there." We had been tried as by
fire, and we were confident that we could meet any prob-
lem which might come. It was a socialist who wrote the
other day: **No wrong exists in America that cannot be
righted without the shedding of a drop of blood; but no
wrong was ever righted by doing nothing." We wanted
something done without delay in the same great spirit that
took us into war to win, regardless of all party lines.

DISTURBING THE SEX BALANCE

The visitor to Europe has been shocked by the destruc-
tion of the sex balance. Many a year will pass away before
that sin for which Germany is responsible by the planning
and precipitation of the war will be forgiven. Millions of
the world's marriageable men are dead. More millions,
crippled, maimed, shell-shocked, are unfit for the respon-
sibilities which marriage brings. The world can get on
without things. It must have people. For thousands of
years the best minds and best souls have been thinking up
the best methods for insuring the development of the himian
race in right conditions for populating the world with men
and women worthy to receive the torch flung to them by
those who send back word from nameless graves :

To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high!
If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

The Armistice brought us face to face with the necessity
of finding some plan by which young men and women may

WHY WOODROW WILSON WENT TO EUROPE 49

marry earlier, and a proper premium be placed on the bear-
ing of children so that the piteous and unutterable loss
may be as soon as possible replaced.

THE BREAK-UP OF THE OLD

In brief, November 11 marked for the whole world the
parting of the ways. A civilization to which we were all
used had gone. Into a new civilization we had been rudely
flung. Leadership was needed. With eager longing and
unquestioning confidence, we looked to our Executive to
furnish it. No man in history had had perhaps such train-
ing for the part. Our confidence was the greater because
the whole world recognized in him its moral leader, and
such words as he has lately spoken seemed to all right-
minded everywhere veraciously accurate: '* There is a
great wave of moral force moving through the world, and
every man who opposes himself to that wave will go down
in disgrace."

THE PRESIDENT DECIDES TO GO ABROAD

Yet with this supreme and importunate call for leader-
ship ringing in his ears, our President announced November
18 his purpose^^to sail December 3 for Etirope. Never has
any word from the White House so astonished the American
millions. We were reduced to silence. We thought natu-
rally he had good reason for his course. We were willing
to await the explanation'_from him. Few of us embarrassed
him by published criticism. We^were not shunted from our
duty to his sacred office even by the words of a great con-
stitutional lawyer, long-time United States senator, that
the absence of the President at such a crisis was in violation
both of precedent and of the Constitution, and that if he
did leave the country for some weeks, his office was thereby
evacuated. Some who thought he had the right did not

50 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

approve the wisdom of the step, and were not altogether
reassured when on December 2 he casually acquainted
Congress with his purpose to go overseas at the desire of
the Allies to explain to them the peace terms he outlined
to Congress as long ago as January 8, 19 18, and which
were accepted in general both by the Allies and by the
Central Powers when the Armistice was signed. ''I owe it
to them," he said, *'to see to it, so far as in me lies, that
no fault of mistaken interpretation is put upon them, and
no possible effort omitted to realize them."

THE HIGHER PURPOSE

Why was this most significant pilgrimage on record
undertaken? Why was precedent broken without ade-
quate explanation? Perhaps our President furnished the
clue to general understanding when he said in Paris that
he had all his life done the most perfectly natural thing.
With high-minded audacity he was heeding without hesita-
tion the command issued to all public servants earlier by
another President, who once said:

The leader for the time being, whoever he may be, is but an instru-
ment, to be used until broken and then to be cast aside; and if he
is worth his salt he will care no more when he is broken than a sol-
dier cares when he is sent where his life is forfeit in order that the
victory may be won. In the long fight for righteousness the watch-
word for all of us is, spend and be spent. It is a Httle matter whether
any one man fails or succeeds; but the cause shall not fail, for it is the
cause of mankind. We, here in America, hold in our hands the hope
of the world, the fate of the coming years; and shame and disgrace
will be ours if in our eyes the light of high resolve is dimmed, if we
trail in the dust the golden hopes of men. If on this new continent
we merely build another country of great but unjustly divided material
prosperity, we shall have done nothing; and we shall do as little if
we merely set the greed of envy against the greed of arrogance, and
thereby destroy the material well-being of all of us.

WHY WOODROW WILSON WENT TO EUROPE 51

From Vienna to Berlin other conferences had fallen into
evil hands. There was no one to speak the supreme word
with which George Washington and Lincoln long ago made
us familiar on this side of the Atlantic. Conscious of his
strength, unconcerned about his future, Woodrow Wilson
fared forth to match strength with his cosmic peers so that
through all the years to come Paris, 19 19, might tower above
all historic conferences in ideals realized and difficulties in
the main dissolved. The world was worn out with the
strife of tongues and clang of battle. But never could the
world be made safe for Democracy until every autocratic
root was plucked up from the soil of Europe.

Our President had hitched his wagon to a star, and only
true star gazers — always few — could take him, at first, at
his own valuation. Plain people whom Woodrow Wilson
has often said he trusts were doing their own thinking, and
a truckman put the case with more ruggedness than our
literati usually employ: ''Maybe the President made a
mistake or two in the way he went to Europe! But, gee!
even a President may make a break sometimes. If he did
not, he would never get my vote. No man who always
hits it off just right is the right sort. Folks want a Presi-
dent who isn't afraid to make a blunder now and then
while he is trying to do something big. I guess the Presi-
dent knows what he is doing over there, and I think the
people will stand by him when they learn the truth in full."

THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

The presidential trip was predetermined when the League
to Enforce Peace was organized in 19 15 in Philadelphia
with Mr. Taft as president. It was then highly resolved
by a large nimiber of America's most distinguished publicists
that public opinion should be created to make the Great
5

52 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

War the last war, to create any machinery necessary in
achieving this purpose, and if need be to enforce peace by
a league of trustworthy nations. Much discussion has
since followed. The league idea has captured the imagi-
nation of America. Organizations have been effected
everywhere. Campaigns have been conducted for four
years, culminating in a series of conventions held in February
in nine of the greatest cities to crystallize public opinion
now practically unanimous for such a peace as no Kaiser
and no Bolsheviki can by power or craft ever again break.

Many believe that Woodrow Wilson neither seeks advice
nor invites criticism. On the contrary, as long ago as 1893
he made appeal for public confidence in his honesty of pur-
pose and declared that he knew with what spirit he was
wont to write. More recently he has indicated that it
hurts to be misjudged. Everybody does know more than
anybody, and Woodrow Wilson has in all his public life
listened for the judgment of the masses. Again and again
he has made appeal to the people, and if any doubt his
honesty of purpose in becoming the peace pilot of the
world, they are not likely to be found. among those plain
people whom Lincoln said the Lord must love or He would
not have made so many of them.

As early as May 27, 19 16, Woodrow Wilson expressed
approval of the purpose of the League to Enforce Peace,
without accepting any special scheme proposed. That was
in fact the day he declared his belief that the peoples of
the world were in accord, *'that the nations of the world
must in some way band themselves together to see that
the right prevails as against any sort of selfish aggression;
that henceforth alliance must not be set up against alliance,
understanding against understanding, but that there must
be a common agreement for a common object, and that at

WHY WOODROW WILSON WENT TO EUROPE 53

the heart of that common object must He the inviolable
rights of peoples and of mankind. The nations of the
world have become each other's neighbors. It is to their
interest that they should understand each other. In order
that they may understand each other, it is imperative
that they should agree to cooperate in a common cause,
and that they should so act that the guiding principle of
that common cause should be even handed and impartial
justice/'

Had one of Mr. H. G. Wells's creatures from another
planet had access to the inmost thoughts of Mr. Wilson
when word came on November 11 that the Armistice was
signed, he could probably have reported to us that . the
President of the United States was not unmindful of the
reconstruction problems, acute, immediate, perilous, com-
plicated, and nation-wide, but that he also realized that
no permanent solution could be found for them unless the
world peace was first established on sure and lasting foun-
dations.

Woodrow Wilson's terms of peace had been accepted both
by friends and by enemies without explanation, and he
acclaimed the leader to secure peace for the world. His
first duty, though as he said to Congress on December 2
he realized the inconveniences attending his absence from
the country at this time, was to do his part at close range
''in making good" what millions had given their life blood
to prove good.

SOUNDING OUT THE WORLD

He sailed for Europe on December 3 to focalize there as
here public opinion — so far as in him lay — for a world
peace. With grim resolution, he seemed determined — it
was commonly reported — to get behind the rulers if need

54 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

be to the people whom they represented. He was not
unmindful that nations closer to the seat of war had need
to maintain at least the balance of power. It was the
only agency that England, for instance, could at times
devise to save her soul alive. France, taught by Edward
VII to trust her ancient foe, had come to believe that the
balance of power upheld by nations like Great Britain,
France, and the United States would furnish a sufficient
safeguard for the future. It was with this in mind that
Clemenceati, even after Wilson landed on European soil,
openly announced his confidence in the balance of power,
and was sustained by practically all of his constituents.

Stephen Lauzanne, in Le Matin, cleared away all possible
misapprehension by proclaiming France's sympathy with
the league idea, while indicating that many Frenchmen
were still skeptical as to its practicability. What differ-
ence of opinion there was in no way touched the value of
the idea, but merely the possibility of adapting it to work-
aday conditions. The whole loaf tasted good in prospect;
it might be necessary to accept the half-loaf only rather
than go hungry altogether.

The conversion of England has been steadily proceeding.
Both the Prime Minister and the leaders of the opposition
weeks ago declared for a league. Lord Robert Cecil and
Sir Edward Grey had been among its most convincing
exponents. The only opposition worth considering in
England has come from a small group who are sure, with
Hotspur, that they could call spirits from the vasty deep,
but wondered if they would come. Lord Chamwood sees
straight and makes the obvious suggestion that the present
combination continue to work together and ''cultivate
assiduously that understanding between their peoples by
which their efforts thus far have been sustained."

WHY WOODROW WILSON WENT TO EUROPE 55

Already Great Britain understands that, so far as the
United States is concerned, she may keep as large a fleet
as she deems necessary. Our President has both visited
the devastated region and twice spoken in vehement indig-
nation at the conduct of the enemy at Rheims and other
places. France is in no doubt that America has been
committed by our President to the complete compensation —
so far as that is possible — for the damage done to France
by the now humiliated foeman. All agree that Belgium
shall rise out of her wreckage a free and unconditioned
sovereign nation, and that all the little nations which in
this war have proved their moral and political equilibrium
shall hereafter live under their own vine and figtree with
none to molest or make them afraid.

Details enough remain to keep the Conference busy many
a day. The remaking of the world's geography does not
grow easier because there is agreement as to general prin-
ciples. Mathematics and psychology, history and economics,
are now put to a test never felt before in the rebuilding
of the world. But times have changed since Bismarck
crowned the Emperor of Germany at Versailles. The old
order has given way to new. The people have come into
their own. As the President said on January 25, **the
select classes of mankind are no longer the governors of
mankind. The fortunes of mankind are now in the hands
of the plain people of the world," and the League of Nations
is **the keynote of the whole."

THE WINNING OF THE WORLD

Woodrow Wilson opened a new chapter in .the history
of man in his address on January 25 to the Peace Confer-
ence. The unqualified and immediate approval with which
his words were met indicated beyond peradventiure that

56 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

the case for the League of Nations has been won, and
problems like the freedom of the seas, the creation of
administrative machinery adequate to the new needs, the
settlement of the difficulties between Italy and the Jugo-
slavs, between China and Japan, and the adjudication of the
case of Germany will be determined without malice but with
ruthless regard for the damage Germany has done to Europe.

HOW IT WAS DONE

How has Woodrow Wilson, sometime college professor
and college president, achieved the most colossal task that
ever fell to man? Plain speech is now in order. What if
Europe did feel a kind of joyous agony at the prospect of the
coming of the peace pilot? The circumstances in which he
went were not altogether joyous to him, even in such com-
fortable quarters as the ''George Washington" afforded.
What if at home and abroad the fourteen points seemed
for a time like mediaeval angels struggling for a footing on
the point of a frail needle? What if French wit, unmatched
elsewhere, wondered why Woodrow Wilson needed to
promulgate fourteen commandments, while God Almighty
had been content with ten?

How simple it all is. The war was at an end. Men
everywhere realized how nerve-worn the world was. Reac-
tion was inevitable. No one knew this better than the
President. He saw his duty, novel as it was. He had no
thought that all would see it as he saw it. He could not
be himself and everybody else at the same time. He set
his jaw to do his task. But he wreathed his face in smiles,
and so behaved that Paris spoke out of a full heart of his
** exquisite tact." He made many speeches, but he never
spoke a tactless word or did a graceless deed. As he went
visiting among the allied peoples, the Wilson smile brushed

WHY WOODROW WILSON WENT TO EUROPE 57

far away distrust, any disposition which there may have
been to secret diplomacy and racial underhandedness dis-
appeared, and even from wrongs as old as Europe and
from sufferings as poignant as the Crucifixion the foun-
tains of new life sprang up and **the very pulse of the
world" began to beat anew to the bigness and the sanctity
of the whole enterprise. Mettemich and Bismarck had at
last given way in the calendar of politics to Woodrow
Wilson.

On such a heaven-kissing hill Woodrow Wilson main-
tained his balance, and when he comes home to stay the
problems so perplexing here will be the easier to solve
because he will have given them a world background of
peace seen through the vista of the League of Nations
constituted to do right though the heavens fall and ever
mindful of the message of the One who said He came **not
to be ministered unto, but to minister."

A UNIVERSAL SENTIMENT

A universal sentiment no one can deny who reads widely
has been expressed by the golden pen of Henri Lavedan,
writing for the Paris Illustration:

With what will, with what sureness of manoeuvre, of thought, of
means, of pen, and of word, what dignity, what purity of conscience,
what largeness and what vigilance of mind, what charity of heart,
what generosity of soul, he has fulfilled the mission of which he felt
no fear, in the face of all the most closely linked problems of the past
and the present, of assuming the responsibility!

We have seen him!

We have admired him I

Our descendants will be dazzled in their turn, and that will remain
one of the magnificences of history.

President Wilson will appear later in the poetry of future ages
like a Dante, of whom he has the legendary profile, guiding with

58 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

precaution, in the infernal circles, the length of the abyss in which
she risked descending, that Beatrice in a white robe that is called
Peace.

He wanted Peace.

To seek her, to attract her, to draw near to her, to prepare her,
facilitate her, and make her conformable to all the exigencies of h^onor
and of security that were demanded of her, he had the tranquil fanati-
cism of the Good.

And if he has succeeded in this task that seemed insurmountable,
it is because he has not wanted Peace except through Justice and
for Justice.

It is for Peace and for Justice that he made war.

Ever this man of the Law, this jurist of Sinai, this Solomon of the
Right and of Duty, subordinated everything, his own conduct and
that of the States of which he was the absolute representative, the
direction of policy and of the war, and all the embarrassments and
all the questions of every kind, to this exclusive and dominating
sentiment of Justice.

He was possessed as if by a beneficent demon.

To wish and to do in all things nothing but Justice!

To want Justice and to do Justice entirely, or at least as completely
as possible, humanly speaking.

Such a disposition, intellectual and psychic, supported by con-
victions and beliefs on high, inaccessible, could alone communicate
to his decisions the serene force and authority that imposed them.

A thing astonishing and significant — he was so devoted to this
fundamental task and he worked at it with such perfect scruple of
conscience, such a fine use of reason, such a calm and incessant recourse
to wisdom, such a moderation in ideas and terms, with so much method,
prudence, order, and amplitude, that he seemed sometimes detached
from it.

He had no n^ed of passion, of anger, or of fracas to make heard
the thunder, even and warning, of his thought.

No apparel of the theater, no ostentation, but a biblical manner!

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES,
AND RESPONSES

OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE PRESIDENT'S
INTENTION TO VISIT EUROPE

On November i8, 19 18, the following statement was
issued from the White House:

The President expects to sail for France immediately after the
opening of the regular session of Congress, for the purpose of taking
part in the discussion and settlement of the main features of the treaty
of peace.

It is not likely that it will be possible for him to remain throughout
the sessions of the formal Peace Conference, but his presence at the
outset is necessary in order to obviate the manifest disadvantages
of discussion by cable in determining the greater outlines of the
final treaty, about which he must necessarily be consulted.

He will, of course, be accompanied by delegates who will sit as
the representatives of the United States throughout the Conference.
The names of the delegates will be presently announced.

This was supplemented on November 29 by the following
announcement regarding the membership of the United
States delegation to the Peace Conference:

It was announced at the Executive offices tonight that the repre-
sentatives of the United States at the Peace Conference would be: the
President himself, the Secretary of State, the Hon. Henry White,
recently ambassador to France, Mr. Edward M. House, and General
Tasker H. Bliss.

62 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

THE PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE TO CONGRESS

On December 3, 19 18, President Wilson read his annual message
to Congress, in which he paid eloquent tribute to the bravery of Ameri-
can soldiers and sailors and to the fine temper of the American people
and dealt with reconstruction problems, taxation, and the railroad
situation.

The special paragraphs dealing with his proposed trip follow:

I welcome this occasion to announce to the Congress my
purpose to join in Paris the representatives of the Govern-
ments with which we have been associated in the war against
the Central Empires for the purpose of discussing with them
the main features of the treaty of peace. I realize the great
inconveniences that will attend my leaving the country,
particularly at this time, but the conclusion that it was my
paramount duty to go has been forced upon me by con-
siderations which I hope will seem as conclusive to you as
they have seemed to me. ,

The allied Governments have accepted the bases of peace
which I outlined to the Congress on the eighth of January
last, as the Central Empires also have, and very reason-
ably desire my personal counsel in their interpretation and
application, and it is highly desirable that I should give it
in order that the sincere desire of our Government to
contribute without selfish purposes of any kind to settle-
ments that will be of common benefit to all the nations
concerned may be made fully manifest. The peace settle-
ments which are now to be agreed upon are of transcendent
importance both to us and to the rest of the world, and I
know of no business or interest which should take preced-
ence of them. The gallant men of our armed forces on
land and sea have consciously fought for the ideals which
they knew to be the ideals of their country; I have sought
to express those ideals; they have accepted my statements

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 63

of them as the substance of their own thought and purpose,
as the associated Governments have accepted them; I owe
it to them to see to it, so far as in me lies, that no false or
mistaken interpretation is put upon them, and no possible
effort omitted to realize them. It is now my duty to play
my full part in making good what they offered their life's
blood to obtain. I can think of no call to service which
could transcend this.

I shall be in close touch with you and with affairs on this
side the water, and you will know all that I do. At my
request the French and English Governments have abso-
lutely removed the censorship of cable news which until
within a fortnight they had maintained, and there is now
no censorship whatever exercised at this end except upon
attempted trade communications with eneiny countries.
It has been necessary to keep an open wire constantly
available between Paris and the Department of State and
another between France and the Department of War. In
order that this might be done with the least possible inter-
ference with the other uses of the cables, I have temporarily
taken over the control of both cables in order that they
may be used as a single system. I did so at the advice
of the most experienced cable officials, and I hope that the
results will justify my hope that the news of the next few
months may pass with the utmost freedom and with the
least possible delay from each side of the sea to the other.

May I not hope, gentlemen of the Congress, that in the
delicate tasks I shall have to perform on the other side of
the sea, in my efforts truly and faithfully to interpret the
principles and purposes of the country we love, I may have
the encouragement and the added strength of your united
support? I realize the magnitude and difficulty of the
duty I am undertaking; I am poignantly aware of its grave

64 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

responsibilities. I am the servant of the nation. I can
have no private thought or purpose of my own in perform-
ing such an errand. I go to give the best that is in me to
the common settlements which I must now assist in arriv-
ing at in conference with the other working heads of the
associated Governments. I shall count upon your friendly
countenance and encouragement. I shall not be inaccessible.
The cables and the wireless will render me available for any
counsel or service you may desire of me, and I shall be happy
in the thought that I am constantly in touch with the weighty
matters of domestic policy with which we shall have to
deal. I shall make my absence as brief as possible and
shall hope to return with the happy assurance that it has
been possible to translate into action the great ideals for
which America has striven.

THE VOYAGE BEGINS

President Wilson, Mrs. Wilson, and the rest of the presi-
dential party left Washington at midnight on the evening
of December 3, 19 18, and embarked on the steamship
''George Washington" at Hoboken, sailing from there at
10:15 A.M. on December 4.

The President's steamship was accompanied by a naval
convoy, consisting of the super-dreadnaught ''Pennsyl-
vania,'* flagship of Admiral Henry T. Mayo, commander-
in-chief of the battle fleet, and a flotilla of destroyers.

New York gave the party a noisy but most enthusiastic
send-off. Opposite the Statue of Liberty the transport
"Minnehaha," bringing back many American troops from
Europe, saluted the Commander-in-Chief, who waved his
greetings repeatedly. Airplanes circled over the ship until
it passed out to sea.

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 65

ON THE HIGH SEAS

Among those accompanying the President and Mrs.
Wilson were: Robert Lansing, secretary of state; Mrs.
Lansing; J. J. Jusserand, the French ambassador; Count
V. Macchi di Cellere, the ItaHan ambassador; M. Cartier
de Marchienne, the Belgian minister, and members of their
families accompanying them; Rear Admiral Gary T.
Grayson, the private physician of the President, and Henry
White, a member of the American Peace Mission; and a
ntimber of historical, geographical, and other experts.
Colonel House and General Bliss, the other members of
the Peace Delegation, were already in Paris.

The voyage was pleasant but uneventful. The President
worked at his speeches and was in frequent conference
with the members of his official party.

During the voyage President and Mrs. Wilson sent an
autographed letter, by carrier pigeon, to Rear Admiral
Gleaves, thanking him for the admirable arrangements he
had made for the trip.

ARRIVAL AT BREST

Brest is a fortified seaport on the most westerly coast of France,
with a population of over seventy-five thousand. It is a naval station
of the first class, containing a roadstead 14 miles long by 4 miles wide.
It is directly connected by cable with the United States and with
French West Africa. Brest once belonged to England, but when
Francis I married Claude, daughter of Anne of Brittany, it passed
to the French crown. Richelieu built its first fortifications in 1631.
Two famous naval engagements occurred off Brest, one in 1694, when
the English, under Lord Berkeley, beat the French, and the other
exactly one hundred years later, when the French turned the tables
and defeated Lord Howe, during the American Revolutionary War.

Large additional docks and miles of trackage, with modem Ameri-
can equipment, were constructed at Brest in the face of innumerable
difficulties, but in record time, by United States army engineers.

66 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

The President landed at Brest at 3:24 p.m., on December
13, and at 4:00 p.m. left for Paris.

The mayor of Brest, M. Goude, read the following address
to the President:

ADDRESS OF WELCOME

Mr. President: I feel the deepest emotion in presenting to you the
welcome of the Breton population. The ship bringing you to this
port is the symbol under the auspices of which the legions of your
pacific citizens sprang to arms in the grand cause of independence.
Under the same auspices to-day you bring to the tormented soil of
Europe the comfort of your authorized voice in the debates which
will calm our quarrels.

Mr. President, upon this Breton soil our hearts are unanimous in
saluting you as the messenger of justice and peace. To-morrow it will
be our entire nation which will acclaim you, and our whole people
will thrill with enthusiasm over the eminent statesman who is the
champion of their aspirations toward justice and liberty.

This old Breton city has the honor of first saluting you. In order
to perpetuate this honor to our descendants, the Municipal Council
has asked me to present you with an address expressing their joy at
being privileged to incline themselves before the illustrious democrat
who presides over the destinies of the great Republic of the United
States.

The Mayor then presented the engrossed address of the
Council, which said in part:

Being the first to welcome the President of the United States to
France, we respectfully salute the eminent statesman who so nobly
personifies the ideals of liberty and the rights of man. In order to
perpetuate this event through the ages we direct that these proceed-
ings be deposited in the city archives. Long live President Wilson!
Long live the champion and apostle of international justice!

Speaking in a clear voice, the President acknowledged
the greeting and read a brief address in response.

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 67

The French government was represented at Brest by
M. Stephen Pichon, foreign minister, and M. Georges
Leygues, minister of marine. Miss Margaret Wilson, the
President's daughter, was among the first to greet her
father on French soil. About fifty American and French
warships roared a greeting to the "George Washington."

PARIS: LUNCHEON AT THE ELYSEE PALACE

The Elys^e Palace, the official residence of the President of the French
Republic, is a modern structure, built in 1718 for Louis d'Auvergne,
Count d'Erveux, and was for a while the residence of Madame de
Pompadour. Napoleon I and Louis Napoleon III also lived there.

On December 14, 191 8, President Raymond Poincare entertained
President Wilson at luncheon at the Elys^e. In welcoming his guest,
President Poincare said:

Mr. President: Paris and France awaited you with impa-
tience. They were eager to acclaim in you the illustrious
democrat whose words and deeds were inspired by exalted
thought, the philosopher delighting in the solution of uni-
versal laws from particular events, the eminent statesman
who had found a way to express the highest political and
moral truths in formulas which bear the stamp of immor-
tality.

They had also a passionate desire to offer thanks in your
person for the invaluable assistance which had been given
spontaneously during this war to the defenders of right
and liberty.

Even before America had resolved to intervene in the
struggle, she had shown to the wounded and to the orphans
of France a solicitude and a generosity the memory of which
will always be enshrined in our hearts. The liberality of
your Red Cross, the countless gifts of your fellow citizens,

68 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

the inspiring initiative of American women, anticipated
your military and naval action and showed the world to
which side your sympathies inclined. And on the day
when you flung yoiurselves into the battle, with what deter-
mination your great people and yourself prepared for
united success!

Some months ago you cabled to me that the United
States would send ever-increasing forces until the day
should be reached on which the allied armies were able
to submerge the enemy under an overwhelming flow of
new divisions; and, in effect, for more than a year a steady
stream of youth and energy has been poured upon the
shores of France.

No sooner had they landed than your gallant battalions,
fired by their chief, General Pershing, flung themselves
into the combat with such a manly contempt of danger,
such a smiling disregard of death, that our longer experience
of this terrible war often moved us to counsel prudence.
They brought with them, in arriving here, the enthusiasm
of the Crusaders leaving for the Holy Land. It is their
right to-day to look with pride upon the work accomplished
and to rest assured that they have powerfully aided by their
courage and their faith.

Eager as they were to meet the enemy, they did not
know when they arrived the enormity of his crimes. That
they might know how the German armies make war it
has been necessary that they see towns systematically
burned down, mines flooded, factories reduced to ashes,
orchards devastated, cathedrals shelled and fired — all that
deliberate savagery, aimed to destroy national wealth,
natture, and beauty, which the imagination could not con-
ceive at a distance from the men and things that have
endured it and to-day bear witness.

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 69

In your turn, Mr. President, you will be able to measure
with your own eyes the extent of these disasters, and the
French government will make known to you the authentic
documents in which the German General Staff developed
with astounding cynicism its program of pillage and indus-
trial annihilation. Your noble conscience will pronounce a
verdict on these facts. Should this guilt remain unpunished,
could it be renewed, the most splendid victories would be
in vain.

Mr. President, France has struggled, has endured, and
has suffered during four long years; she has bled at every
vein; she has lost the best of her children; she mourns for
her youths. She yearns now, even as you do, for a peace
of justice and security.

It was not that she might be exposed once again to aggres-
sion that she submitted to such sacrifices. Nor was it in
order that criminals should go unpunished, that they might
lift their heads again to make ready for new crimes, that,
under your strong leadership, America armed herself and
crossed the ocean.

Faithful to the memory of Lafayette and Rochambeau,
she came to the aid of France because France herself was
faithful to her traditions. Our common ideal has triumphed.
Together we have defended the vital principles of free
nations. Now we must build together such a peace as will
forbid the deliberate and hypocritical renewing of an organ-
ism aiming at conquest and oppression.

Peace must make amends for the misery and sadness of
yesterday, and it must be a guaranty against the dangers
of to-morrow. The association which has been formed for
the purpose of war, between the United States and the
Allies, and which contains the seed of the permanent insti-
tutions of which you have spoken so eloquently, will find

70 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

from this day forward a clear and profitable employment
in the concerted search for equitable decisions and in the
mutual support which we need if we are to make our rights
prevail.

Whatever safeguards we may erect for the future, no one,
alas, can assert that we shall forever spare to mankind the
horrors of new wars. Five years ago the progress of
science and the state of civilization might have permitted
the hope that no government, however autocratic, would
have succeeded in hurling armed armies upon Belgium
and Serbia.

Without lending ourselves to the illusion that posterity
will be forevermore safe from these collective follies, we must
introduce into the peace we are going to build all the con-
ditions of justice and all the safeguards of civilization that
we can embody in it. To such a vast and magnificent
task, Mr. President, you have chosen to come and apply
yourself in concert with France. France offers you her
thanks. She knows the friendship of America. She knows
your rectitude and elevation of spirit. It is in the fullest
confidence that she is ready to work with you.

REPLY BY PRESIDENT WILSON

Mr, President: I am deeply indebted to you for your
gracious greeting. It is very delightful to find myself in
France and to feel the quick contact of sympathy and
unaffected friendship between the representatives of the
United States and the representatives of France.

You have been very generous in what you were pleased
to say about myself, but I feel that what I have said and
what I have tried to do has been said and done only in an
attempt to speak the thought of the people of the United
States truly, and to carry that thought out in action.

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 71

From the first, the thought of the people of the United
States turned toward something more than the mere win-
ning of this war. It turned to the estabHshment of eternal
principles of right and justice. It realized that merely to
win the war was not enough; that it must be won in such
a way and the questions raised by it settled in such a way
as to insure the future peace of the world and lay the foun-
dations for the freedom and happiness of its many peoples
and nations.

Never before has war worn so terrible a visage or exhib-
ited more grossly the debasing influence of illicit ambitions.
I am sure that I shall look upon the ruin wrought by the
armies of the Central Empires with the same repulsion and
deep indignation that they stir in the hearts of men of
France and Belgitim, and I appreciate, as you do, sir, the
necessity of such action in the final settlement of the issues
of the war as will not only rebuke such acts of terror and
spoliation, but make men everywhere aware that they
cannot be ventured upon without the certainty of just
punishment.

I know with what ardor and enthusiasm the soldiers and
sailors of the United States have given the best that was in
them to this war of redemption. They have expressed
the true spirit of America. They believe their ideals to
be acceptable to free peoples ever3rwhere, and are rejoiced
to have played the part they have played in giving reality
to those ideals in cooperation with the armies of the Allies.
We are proud of the part they have played, and we are
happy that they should have been associated with such
comrades in common cause.

It is with peculiar feeling, Mr. President, that I find
myself in France joining with you in rejoicing over the
victory that has been won. The ties that bind France

72 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

and the United States are peculiarly close. I do not know
in what other comradeship we could have fought with
more zest or enthusiasm. It will daily be a matter of pleas-
ure with me to be brought into consultation with the states-
men of France and her allies in concerting the measures
by which we may secure permanence for these happy
relations of friendship and cooperation, and secure for the
world at large such safety and freedom in its life as can be
secured only by the constant association and cooperation
of friends.

I greet you not only with deep personal respect, but as
the representative of the great people of France, and beg
to bring to you the greetings of another great people to
whom the fortunes of France are of profound and lasting
interest.

REPLY TO SOCIALIST DELEGATION
Paris, December 14, 19 18

Gentlemen: I received with great interest the address
which you have just read to me. The war through which
we have just passed has illustrated in a way which never
can be forgotten the extraordinary wrongs which can be
perpetrated by arbitrary and irresponsible power.

It is not possible to secure the happiness and prosperity
of the world, to establish an. enduring peace, unless the
repetition of such wrongs is rendered impossible. This has
indeed been a peoples' war. It has been waged against
absolutism and militarism, and these enemies of liberty
must from this time forth be shut out from the possibility
of working their cruel will upon mankind.

In my judgment, it is not sufficient to establish this
principle. It is necessary that it should be supported by
a cooperation of the nations which shall be based upon

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 73

fixed and definite covenants, and which shall be made
certain of effective action through the instrumentality of a
League of Nations. I believe this to be the conviction of
all thoughtful and liberal men.

I am confident that this is the thought of those who
lead your own great nation, and I am looking forward with
peculiar pleasure to cooperating with them in securing
guaranties of a lasting peace of justice and right dealing
which shall justify the sacrifices of this war and cause men
to look back upon those sacrifices as the dramatic and
final processes of their emancipation.

A CITIZEN OF PARIS

On December 16 the President was given the freedom of the city
of Paris at a ceremony which took place in the H6tel de Ville.

The present Hdtel de Ville was built in 1 873-1 882 on the site of
a town hall built from 1535 to 1628, on the right bank of the Seine
opposite the Ile-de-la-Cit^. Its predecessor was destroyed by the
Communists in 1870. It is in the typically modem French Renais-
sance style, with highly decorated pilasters, high-pitched roofs, and
dormer windows.

M. Adrien Mithouard, president of the Municipal Council, con-
ferred the freedom of the city upon Mr. Wilson.

In the course of the ceremonies he presented to him the great gold
medal of the city of Paris, and to Mrs. Wilson a diamond brooch.

The President replied as follows to the address of M. Mithouard:

Your greeting has raised many emotions within me. It
is with no ordinary sympathy that the people of the United
States, for whom I have the privilege of speaking, have
viewed the sufferings of the people of France. Many of
our own people have been themselves witnesses of those
sufferings.

We were the more deeply moved by the wrongs of the
war because we knew the manner in which they were
perpetrated. I beg that you will not suppose that, because

74 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

a wide ocean separated us in space, we were not in effect
eyewitnesses of the shameful ruin that was wrought and
the cruel and unnecessary sufferings that were brought
upon you. These sufferings have filled our hearts with
indignation. We know what they were, not only, but we
know what they signified, and our hearts were touched to
the quick by them, our imaginations filled with the whole
picture of what France and Belgium in particular had
experienced.

When the United States entered the war, therefore, they
entered it not only because they were moved by a con-
viction that the purposes of the Central Empires were
wrong and must be resisted by men everywhere who
loved liberty and the right, but also because the illicit
ambitions which they were entertaining and attempting
to realize had led to the practices which shocked our hearts
as much as they offended our principles. Our resolution
was formed because we knew how profoundly great prin-
ciples of right were affected, but our hearts moved also
with our resolution.

You have been exceedingly generous in what you have
been gracious enough to say about me — generous far beyond
my personal deserts; but you have interpreted, with real
insight, the motives and resolution of the people of the
United States. Whatever influence I exercise, whatever
authority I speak with, I derive from them. I know what
they have thought, I know what they have desired, and
when I have spoken what I knew was in their minds it has
been delightful to see how the consciences and purposes of
freemen everywhere responded. We have merely estab-
lished our right to the full fellowship of those peoples here
and throughout the world who reverence the right of genu-
ine liberty and justice.

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 75

You have made me feel very m.uch at home here, not
merely by the delightful warmth of your welcome, but also
by the manner in which you have made me realize to the
utmost the intimate community of thought and ideal which
characterize your people and the great nation which I have
the honor for the time to represent.

Your welcome to Paris I shall always remember as one
of the unique and inspiring experiences of my life, and,
while I feel that you are honoring the people of the United
States in my person, I shall nevertheless carry away with
me a very keen personal gratification in looking back upon
these memorable days.

Permit me to thank you from a full heart.

AT THE SORBONNE

President Wilson was made a Doctor of Laws by the University of
Paris on December 21, 19 18. The ceremony took place at the Sor-
bonne, which houses the Faculties of Science and Literature.

The President spoke as follows in acknowledging the honor which
had been bestowed upon him:

I feel very keenly the distinguished honor which has been
conferred upon me by the great University of Paris, and it
is very delightful to me also to have the honor of being
inducted into the great company of scholars whose life
and fame have made the history of the University of Paris
a thing admirable among men of cultivation in all parts
of the world.

By what you have said, sir, of the theory of education
which has been followed in France and which I have tried
to promote in the United States, I am tempted to venture
upon a favorite theme.

I have always thought that the chief object of education
was to awaken the spirit, and that, inasmuch as a literature

76 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

whenever it has touched its great and higher notes was an
expression of the spirit of mankind, the best induction
into education was to feel the pulses of humanity which
had beaten from age to age through the universities of men
who had penetrated to the secrets of the human spirit.

And I agree with the intimation which has been conveyed
to-day that the terrible war through which we have just
passed has not been only a war between nations, but that
it has been also a war between systems of culture, the one
system, the aggressive system, using science without con-
science, stripping learning of its moral restraints and using
every faculty of the human mind to do wrong to the whole
race; the other system, reminiscent of the high traditions
of men, reminiscent of all these struggles, some of them
obscure, but others closely revealed to history, of men of
indomitable spirit everywhere struggling toward the right
and seeking above all things else to be free.

The triumph of freedom in this war means that that
spirit shall now dominate the world. There is a great
wave of moral force moving through the world, and every
man who opposes himself to that wave will go down in
disgrace.

The task of those who are gathered here, or will presently
be gathered here, to make the settlements of this peace is
greatly simplified by the fact that they are the masters
of no one; they are the servants of mankind.

And if we do not heed the mandates of mankind, we shall
make ourselves the most conspicuous and deserved failures
in the history of the world.

My conception of the League of Nations is just this:
That it shall operate as the organized moral force of men
throughout the world, and that whenever or wherever

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES ^-j

wrong and aggression are planned or contemplated, this
searching light of conscience will be turned upon them,
and men everywhere will ask, ''What are the purposes
that you hold in your heart against the fortunes of the
world?"

Just a little exposure will settle most questions. If the
Central Powers had dared to discuss the purposes of this
war for a single fortnight, it never would have happened.
And if, as should be, they were forced to discuss it for a
year, the war would have been inconceivable.

So I feel that this war is, as has been said more than
once to-day, intimately related with the university spirit.
The university spirit is intolerant of all the things that put
the human mind under restraint. It is intolerant of every-
thing that seeks to retard the advancement of ideals, the
acceptance of the truth, the purification of life.

And every university man can ally himself with the
forces of the present time with the feeling that now at last
the spirit of truth, the spirit to which universities have
devoted themselves, has prevailed and is triumphant.

If there is one point of pride that I venture to entertain,
it is that it has been my private privilege in some measure
to interpret the university spirit in the public life of a great
nation, and I feel that in honoring me to-day in this unusual
and conspicuous manner you have first of all honored the
people whom I represent.

The spirit that I try to express I know to be their spirit,
and in proportion as I serve them I believe that I advance
the cause of freedom.

I, as before, wish to thank you, sir, from the bottom of
my heart for a distinction which has in a singular way
crowned my academic career.

78 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

CHRISTMAS AT CHAUMONT

Chaumont, General Pershing's headquarters, where President
Wilson spent Christmas Day and reviewed and addressed the Amer-
ican troops, is a town of over twelve thousand people in Eastern
France, the chief city in La Haute-Mame, 163 miles east-southeast
from Paris.

This little town was famous in history before American troops
made it their headquarters in 1918. In 1814 Great Britain, Austria,
Russia, and Prussia signed a treaty there (dated March i, signed
March 9) agreeing to conclude a separate peace with Napoleon I,
but to continue the war until France was reduced to the boundaries
of 1792.

President Wilson was greatly interested in his visit to Chaumont.
He visited the men in their quarters and spoke informally to many of
them, bringing a word of cheer from home.

WELCOME BY GENERAL PERSHING

Mr. President and Fellow Soldiers: We are gathered here to-day
to do honour to the commander of our armies and navies. For the
first time an American president will review an American army on
foreign soil — the soil of a sister republic — beside whose gallant troops
we have fought to restore peace to the world.

Speaking for you and your comrades, I am proud to declare to the
President that no army has ever more loyally or more effectively
served its country and none has ever fought in a nobler cause.

You, Mr. President, by your confidence and by your support, have
made the success of our army, an,d to you as our commander-in-chief
may I now present the nation's victorious army.

ADDRESS TO THE AMERICAN TROOPS

General Pershing and Fellow Comrades: I wish that I
could give to each one of you the message that I know you
are longing to receive from those at home who love you.
I cannot do that, but I can tell you how everyone has put
his heart into it. So you have done your duty, and some-
thing more. You have done your duty, and you have
done it with a spirit which gave it distinction and glory.

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 79

And now we are to hail the fruits of everything. You
conquered, when you came over, what you came over for, and
you have done what it was appointed for you to do. I know
what you expected of me. Some time ago a gentleman
from one of the countries with which we are associated
was discussing with me the moral aspects of this war, and
I said that if we did not insist upon the high purpose of
what we now have accomplished the end would not be
justified.

Everybody at home is proud of you and has followed
every movement of this great army with confidence and
affection.

The whole people of the United States are now waiting
to welcome you home with an acclaim which probably has
never greeted any other army, because our country is like
this country, we have been so proud of the stand taken, of
the purpose for which this war was entered by the United
States.

You knew what we expected of you, and you did it. I
know what you and the people at home expected of me, and
I am happy to say, my fellow countrymen, that I do not
find in the hearts of the great leaders with whom it is my
privilege now to cooperate any difference of principle or of
fundamental purpose.

It happened that it was the privilege of America to pre-
sent the chart for peace, and now the process of settlement
has been rendered comparatively simple by the fact that
all the nations concerned have accepted that chart, and the
application of these principles laid down there will be their
application. The world will now know that the nations
that fought this war, as well as the soldiers who represented
them, are ready to make good; make good not only in the
assertion of their own interests, but make good in the

8o AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

establishment of peace upon the permanent foundation of
right and of justice.

Because this is not a war in which the soldiers of the
free nations have obeyed masters. You have commanders,
but you have no masters. Your very commanders repre-
sent you in representing the nation of which you constitute
so distinguished a part.

And everybody concerned in the settlement knows that
it must be a people's peace and that nothing must be done
in the settlement of the issues of the war which is not as
handsome as the great achievements of the armies of the
United States and the Allies.

It is difficult, very difficult, men, in any normal speech
like this to show you my real heart. You men probably
do not realize with what anxious attention and care we have
followed every step you have advanced and how proud we
are that every step was in advance, and not in retreat; that
every time you set your face in any direction you kept
your face in that direction.

A thrill has gone through my heart as it has gone through
the heart of every American with almost every gun that
was fired and every stroke that was struck in the gallant
fighting that you have done, and there has been only one
regret in America, and that was the regret that every man
there felt that he was not here in France, too.

It has been a hard thing to perform the tasks in the
United States; it has been a hard thing to take part in
directing what you did without coming over and helping
you to do it. It has taken a lot of moral courage to stay
at home. But we are proud to back you up everywhere
that it was possible to back you up, and now I am happy
to find what splendid names you have made for yourselves
among the civilian population of France as well as among

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 8i

your comrades in the armies of the French, and it is a fine
testimony to you men that these people Hke you and love
you and trust you, and the finest part of it all is that you
deserve their trust.

I feel a comradeship with you to-day which is delightful
as I look down upon these undisturbed fields and think of
the terrible scenes through which you have gone and realize
how the quiet of peace, the tranquillity of settled hopes, has
descended upon us. And, while it is hard, far away from
home, confidently to bid you a merry Christmas, I can, I
think, confidently promise you a happy New Year, and I
can from the bottom of my heart say, God bless you!

CHRISTMAS MESSAGE FROM PARIS

I hope that it will cheer the people at home to know that
I find their boys over here in fine form and in fine spirits,
esteemed by all those with whom they have been associated
in the war and trusted wherever they go; and they will
also, I am siure, be cheered by the knowledge of the fact
that throughout the great nations with which we have
been associated in this war public opinion strongly sustains
all proposals for a just and lasting peace and a close cooper-
ation of the self-governing peoples of the world in making
that peace secure after its present settlements are formu-
lated.

Nothing could constitute a more acceptable Christmas
reassurance than the sentiments which I find everywhere
prevalent.

82 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

WELCOME TO LONDON

King George V and Queen Mary personally welcomed President
Wilson at Charing Cross Station, London, on December 26.

On the evening of December 27 the King gave a banquet in the
great hall of Buckingham Palace.

Buckingham Palace is on the west side of St. James's Park. It
was built in 1705 for the then Duke of Buckingham. In 1762 George
III purchased it for his London residence. President Wilson was
lodged in the Belgian suite during his visit to London.

King George V, in proposing the health of President Wilson, spoke
as follows:

This is a historic moment and your visit marks a historic
epoch. Nearly 150 years have passed since your Republic
began its independent life, and now, for the first time, a
president of the United States is our guest in England.

We welcome you to the country whence came your ances-
tors and where stand the homes of those from whom sprang
Washington and Lincoln. We welcome you for yourself,
as one whose insight, calmness, and dignity in the discharge
of his high duties we have watched with admiration. We
see in you the happy union of the gifts of a scholar with
those of a statesman. You came from a studious, academic
quiet into the full stream of an arduous life, and your
deliverances have combined breadth of view and grasp of
world problems with the mastery of a lofty diction recalling
that of your great orators of the past and of our own.

You come as the official head and spokesman of a mighty
commonwealth bound to us by the closest ties. Its people
speak the tongue of Shakespeare and Milton. Our litera-
ture is yours as yours is also ours, and men of letters in both
countries have joined in maintaining its incomparable
glories.

To you, not less than to us, belong the memories of our
national heroes from King Alfred down to the days of Philip

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 83

Sidney and Drake, of Raleigh and Blake and Hampden,
and the days when the political life of the English stock in
America was just beginning. You share with us the tradi-
tions of free self-government as old as the Magna Carta.

We recognize the bond of still deeper significance in the
common ideals which our people cherish. First among
those ideals you value and we value freedom and peace.
Privileged as we have been to be the exponents and the
examples in national life of the principles of popular self-
government based upon equal laws, it now falls to both of
us alike to see how these principles can be applied beyond
our own borders for the good of the world.

It was love of liberty, respect for law, good faith, and the
sacred rights of humanity that brought you to the Old
World to help in saving it from the dangers that were threat-
ening around, and that arrayed those soldier-citizens of
yours, whose gallantry we have admired, side by side with
ours in the war.

You have now come to help in building up new states
amid the ruins of those that the war has shattered and in
laying the solid foundations of a settlement that may stand
firm because it will rest upon the consent of the emancipated
nationalities. You have eloquently expressed the hope of
the American people, as it is our hope, that some plan may
be devised to attain the end you have done so much to
promote by which the risk of future wars may, if possible,
be averted, relieving the nations of the intolerable burden
which fear of war has laid upon them.

The British nation wishes all success to the deliberations
on which you and we and the great free nations allied with
us are now to enter, moved by disinterested good will and
a sense of duty commensurate with the power which we
hold as a solemn trust.

84 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

The American and British peoples have been brothers
in arms, and their arms have been crowned with victory.
We thank with all our hearts your valiant soldiers and sailors
for their splendid part in that victory, as we thank the
American people for their noble response to the call of
civilization and humanity. May the same brotherly spirit
inspire and guide our united efforts to secure for the world
the blessings of an ordered freedom and an enduring peace.

In asking you to join with me in drinking the health of
the President, I wish to say with what pleasure we welcome
Mrs. Wilson to this country.

I drink to the health of the President of the United States
and Mrs. Wilson and to the happiness and prosperity of
the great American nation.

REPLY BY PRESIDENT WILSON

I am deeply complimented by the gracious words which
you have uttered. The welcome which you have given
me and Mrs. Wilson has been so warm, so natural, so evi-
dently from the heart, that we have been more than pleased.
We have been touched by it, and I believe that I correctly
interpret that welcome as embodying not only your own
generous spirit toward us personally, but also as expressing
for yourself and the great nation over which you preside
that same feeling for my people, for the people of the United
States.

For you and I, sir — I temporarily —embody the spirit of
two great nations, and whatever strength I have and what-
ever authority, I possess it only so long and so far as I express
the spirit and purpose of the American people.

Every influence that the American people have over the
affairs of the world is measured by their sympathy with
the aspirations of freemen everywhere.

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 85

America does love freedom, and I believe that she loves
freedom unselfishly. But if she does not, she will not and
cannot have the influence to which she justly aspires.

I have had the privilege, sir, of conferring with the leaders
of your own government and with the spokesmen of the
governments of France'^and of Italy, and I am glad to say
that I have the same conceptions that they have of the
significance and scope of the duty on which we have met.

We have uSed great words, all of us have used the great
words ** Right" and ''Justice," and now we are to prove
whether or not we understand these words, and how they
are to be applied to the particular settlements which must
conclude this war. And we must not only understand them,
but we must have the courage to act upon our understanding.

Yet, after I have uttered the word ''Courage," it comes
into my mind that it would take more courage to resist
the great moral tide now running in the world than to yield
to it, than to obey it.

There is a great tide running in the hearts of men. The
hearts of men have never beaten so singularly in unison
before. Men have never before been so conscious of their
brotherhood. Men have never before realized how little
difference there was between right and justice in one lati-
tude and in another, under one sovereignty and under
another.

And it will be our high privilege, I believe, sir, not only
to apply the moral judgment of the world to the particular
settlements which we shall attempt, but also to organize
the moral force of the world to preserve those settlements,
to steady the forces of mankind, and to make the right and
the justice to which great nations like our own have devoted
themselves the predominant and controlling force of the
world.

86 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

There is something inspiring in knowing that this is the
errand that we have come on. Nothing less than this
would have justified me in leaving the important tasks
which fall upon me upon the other side of the sea — nothing
but the consciousness that nothing else compares with this
in dignity and importance.

Therefore it is the more delightful to find myself in the
company of a body of men united in ideal and purpose,
and to feel that I am privileged to unite my thoughts with
yours in carrying forward these standards which we are
so proud to hold so high and to defend.

May I not, sir, with a feeling of profound sincerity and
friendship and sympathy propose your health and the
health of the Queen and the prosperity of Great Britain?

HIS GREATEST BIRTHDAY

On December 28, 19 18, President Wilson celebrated his sixty-second
birthday by a round of official activities.

King George called at the President's apartments at ten o'clock
and wished him many happy returns of the day. For a birthday
gift the King presented a magnificent set of books, and at the same time
gave gifts to every member of the President's official party. The
women received brooches, and the men stickpins set with diamonds
forming the letters "G. R. "

The President received gifts as tokens of the day from Mrs. Wilson
and other members of his family. He said he considered it the
greatest birthday^of his life.

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 87
TO THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS' UNION

The League of Nations Union sent a delegation, headed by Viscount
Grey, former secretary for foreign affairs. Other members were the
Archbishop of Canterbury, ex-Premier Asquith, Viscount Bryce, Lord
Shaw, and Sir Willoughby Dickinson.

Great Britain was, from the first, most hospitable to the idea of a
League of Nations, and President Wilson was greatly encouraged by
the support he received from public opinion in England.

Gentlemen: I am very much complimented that you
should come in person to present this address, and I have
been delighted and stimulated to find the growing and
prevailing interest in the subject of the League of Nations —
not only a growing interest, merely, but a growing purpose,
which I am sure will prevail — and it is delightful that
members of the government which brought this nation into
the war because of the moral obligations based upon a
treaty should be among those who have brought me this
paper, because on the other side of the water we have
greatly admired the motives and subscribed to the principles
which actuated the government of Great Britain in obeying
that moral dictate.

You have shown what we must organize, namely, that
same force and sense of obligation; and unless we organize
it the thing that we do now will not stand.

I feel that so strongly that it is particularly cheering to
know just how strong and imperative the idea has become.
I thank you very much indeed. It has been a privilege
to see you personally.

I was just saying to Lord Grey that we had indirect
knowledge of each other, and that I am glad to identify
him. I feel as if I had met him long ago, and I had the
pleasure of matching minds with Mr. Asquith yesterday.

88 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

TO THE COUNCIL OF FREE CHURCHES

Gentlemen: I am very much honored, and might say
touched, by this beautiful address that you have just read,
and it is very delightful to feel the comradeship of spirit
which is indicated by a gathering like this.

You are quite right, sir, in saying that I do recognize
the sanction of religion in these times of perplexity with
matters so large to settle that no man can feel that his mind
can compass them. I think one would go crazy if he did
not believe in Providence. It would be a maze without a
clue. Unless there were some supreme evidence, we would
despair of the results of human counsel.

So that it is with genuine sympathy that I acknowledge
the spiri*t and thank you for the generosity of your address.

AT THE GUILDHALL

The famous Guildhall of the Corporation of the City of London
was built on the site of an ancient crypt facing a courtyard opening
out of Gresham Street. It was rebuilt in 141 1, was damaged by
the Great Fire of 1666, and restored in 1789. Its great hall, 152
feet in length, is the scene of famous state and municipal banquets
given by the Lord Mayor on behalf of the city. Enormous statues
of the mythical gods of London, Gog and Magog, adorn the great hall.

At the state banquet given on December 28, 191 8, President Wilson
said :

Mr. Lord Mayor: We have come upon times when
ceremonies like this have a new significance, which most
impresses me as I stand here. The address which I have
just heard is most generously and graciously conceived,
and the delightful accent of sincerity in it seems like a part
of that voice of counsel which is now everywhere to be
heard. I feel that a distinguished honor has been con-
ferred upon me by this reception, and I beg to assure you»

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 89

sir, and your associates of my very profound appreciation;
but I know that I am only part of what I may call a great
body of circumstances.

I do not believe that it was fancy on my part that I heard
in the voice of welcome uttered in the streets of this great
city and in the streets of Paris something more than a per-
sonal welcome.

It seemed to me that I heard the voice of one people
speaking to another people, and it was a voice in which
one could distinguish a singular combination of emotions.
There was surely there the deep gratefulness that the fight-
ing was over. There was the pride that the fighting had
had such a culmination. There was that sort of gratitude
that the nations engaged had produced such men as the
soldiers of Great Britain and of the United States and of
France and of Italy — men whose prowess and achievements
they had witnessed with rising admiration as they moved
from culmination to culmination.

But there was something more in it — the consciousness
that the business is not yet done, the consciousness that
it now rests upon others to see that those lives were not
lost in vain.

I have not yet been to the actual battlefield, but I have
been with many of the men who have fought the battles,
and the other day I had the pleasure of being present at a
session of the French Academy when they admitted Marshal
Joffre to their membership.

That sturdy, serene soldier stood and uttered not the
words of triumph, but the simple words of affeetion for his
soldiers and the conviction which he summed up in a sen-
tence which I will not try accurately to quote, but repro-
duce in its spirit. It was that France must always remember
that the small and the weak could never live free in the

90 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

world unless the strong and the great always put their
power and their strength in the service of right.

That is the afterthought — the thought that something
must be done now, not only to make the just settlements —
that, of course — but to see that the settlements remained
and were observed and that honor and justice prevail in
the world. And as I have conversed with the soldiers I
have been more and more aware that they fought for some-
thing that not all of them had defined, but which all of them
recognized the moment you stated it to them. They fought
to do away with an old order and to establish a new one,
and the center and characteristic of the old order was that
unstable thing which we used to call the ''balance of power,"
a thing in which the balance was determined by the sword
which was thrown in on the one side or the other, a balance
which was determined by the unstable equilibrium of
competitive interests, a balance which was maintained by
jealous watchfulness and an antagonism of interests which,
though it was generally latent, was always deep-seated.

The men who have fought in this war have been the men
from the free nations who are determined that that sort
of thing should end now and forever. It is very interest-
ing to me to observe how from every quarter, from every
sort of mind, from every concert of counsel, there comes
the suggestion that there must now be not a balance of
power, not one powerful group of nations set up against
another, but a single, overwhelming, powerful group of
nations who shall be the trustees of the peace of the world.

It has been delightful in my conferences with the leaders
of your government to find how our minds moved along
exactly the same line and how our thought was always
that the key to the peace was the guaranty of the peace,
not the items of it; that the items would be worthless unless

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 91

there stood back of them a permanent concert of power
for their maintenance. That is the most reassuring thing
that has ever happened in the world.

When this war began, the thought of a League of Nations
was indulgently considered as the interesting thought of
closeted students. It was thought of as one of those things
that it was right to characterize by a name which, as a
university man, I have always resented. It was said to
be academic, as if that in itself were a condemnation —
something that men could think about, but never get. Now
we find the practical leading minds of the world deter-
mined to get it.

No such sudden and potent union of purpose has ever
been witnessed in the world before. Do you wonder, there-
fore, gentlemen, that in common with those who represent
you I am eager to get at the business and write the sentences
down, and that I am particularly happy that the ground
is cleared and the foundations laid ? For we have already
accepted the same body of principles. Those principles
are clearly and definitely enough stated to make their
application a matter which should afford no fundamental
difficulty.

And back of us is that imperative yearning of the world
to have all disturbing questions quieted, to have all threats
against peace silenced, to have just men everywhere come
together for a common object. The peoples of the world
want peace and they want it now, not merely by conquest
of arms, but by agreement of mind.

It was this incomparably great object that brought me
overseas. It has never before been deemed excusable for
a president of the United States to leave the territory of
the United States, but I know that I have the support of
the judgment of my colleagues in the government of the

92 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

United States in saying that it was my paramount duty to
turn away even from the imperative tasks at home to lend
such counsel and aid as I could to this great, may I not
say final, enterprise of humanity.

AT THE MANSION HOUSE

The Mansion House is the oflficial residence of the Lord Mayor of
London — humorously called by Punch "The Munching House."
It was erected in 1740.

The Lord Mayor of London has these four special, dearly prized
prerogatives:

1. He can close Temple Bar to the Sovereign. Temple Bar is
the official boundary to "the city" proper.

2. In the city he ranks next the Sovereign.

3. On the accession of a Sovereign he is called to the Privy Council.

4. He is butler at any coronation during his term of office.
President Wilson spoke as follows at the Lord Mayor's luncheon on

December 28:

Mr. Lord Mayor, Your Royal Highness, Your Grace,
Ladies and Gentlemen: You have again made me feel, sir,
the very wonderful and generous welcome of this great
city and you have reminded me of what has perhaps become
one of the habits of my life.

You have said that I have broken all precedents in com-
ing across the ocean to join in the counsels of the Peace
Conference, but I think those who have been associated
with me in Washington will testify that that is nothing
surprising. I said to the members of the press in Washing-
ton one evening that one of the things that had interested
me most since I lived in Washington was that every time
I did anything perfectly natural it was said to be unprece-
dented.

It was perfectly natural to break this precedent, natural
because the demand for intimate conference took precedence

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 93

over every other duty. And, after all, the breaking of
precedents, though thivS may sound strange doctrine in
England, is the most sensible thing to do. The harness
of precedent is sometimes a very sad and harassing trammel.
In this case the breaking of precedent is sensible for a reason
that is very prettily illustrated in a remark attributed to
Charles Lamb. One evening, in a company of his friends,
they were discussing a person who was not present, and
Lamb said, in his hesitating manner: ** I h-hate that fellow."
''Why Charles," one of his friends said, 'M did not know
that you knew him." "Oh," he said "I-I-I d-don't. I
can't h-hate a man I know."

And perhaps that simple and attractive remark may
furnish a secret for cordial international relationship. When
we know one another we cannot hate one another.

I have been very much interested before coming here to
see what sort of a person I was expected to be. So far as
I can make out, I was expected to be a perfectly bloodless
thinking machine, whereas I am perfectly aware that I
have in me all the insurgent elements of the human race.
I am sometimes by reason of long Scottish tradition able
to keep these instincts in restraint. The stern Covenanter
tradition that is behind me sends many an echo down the
years. It is not only diligently to pursue business, but
also to seek this sort of comradeship that I feel it is a privi-
lege to have come across the seas, and in the welcome that
you have accorded Mrs. Wilson and me you have made
us feel that companionship was accessible to us in the most
delightful and enjoyable form.

I thank you sincerely for this welcome, sir, and am very
happy to join in a love feast which is all the more enjoyable
because there is behind it a background of tragical suffer-
ing. Our spirits are released from the darkness of the clouds

94 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

that at one time seemed to have settled upon the world in a
way that could not be dispersed, the sufferings of your
people, the sufferings of the people of France, and the infinite
suffering of the people of Belgium. The whisper of grief
that has been blown all through the world is now silent.
and the sun of hope seems to spread its rays and to charge
the earth with a new prospect of happiness. So. our joy
is all the more elevated because we know that our spirits
are now lifted out of that valley.

CARLISLE: VISITS HIS MOTHER'S HOME

The town of Carlisle, 8 miles south of the Scottish border and 300
miles north of London, was the birthplace and girlhood home of
President Wilson's mother. Her father, the Rev. Thomas Woodrow,
was minister of Lowther Street Congregational Church there. '

In an informal chat with the newspaper correspondents, President
Wilson laughingly told of how near he came to hot being there at all.
He said his mother, a child when she crossed the ocean, was nearly carried
overboard while skipping a rope, but fortunately was rescued in time.
"Otherwise," said the President, "I would never have been here!"

The President went to the Crown and Mitre Hotel, where prominent
citizens were waiting to receive him. Here Thomas Watson, . an
aged house painter and the last living pupil of the school of President
Wilson's grandfather, was introduced to the President.

Grasping the old man's hand, the President asked: "You remem-
ber my grandfather?"

• "I'm afraid not. I was rather a small fellow," replied the old
man, shyly.

President Wilson inspected documents dealing with the residence
in Carlisle of his grandfather, the Rev. Thomas Woodrow, and then
drove to the Salvation Army Hall, where once stood the building
that was the President's mother's home. From here he visited the
Cavendish House, in Warwick Road, which was built by his grand-
father and in which his grandfather taught school and the President's
mother also lived for a while. The President remained for ten minutes,
and proceeded to the Lowther Street Congregational Church, which
was crowded.

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 95

The congregation rose as the President and his party entered and
were conducted to the front pew. As the party walked down the aisle
the organist played "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."

The pastor, the Rev. Mr. Booth, entered the pulpit, accompanied by
the bishop of Carlisle, the Right Rev. John William Diggle, D.D., who
read the sec6nd lesson and afterward made an address of welcome
to the President.

At the conclusion of his sermon the Rev. Mr. Booth said:

"Mr. President, two-thirds of your name belongs here, as the words
'Thomas Woodrow' were inscribed on the church roll ninety- eight
years ago. From then until 1835 he taught the church the word
of God. He gathered around him a devoted band of people who
learned to do righteously. Here his children, among them your
sainted mother, learned to sing their hymns and to fear God. Hence
the peculiar gratification which their church felt and expressed on your
election to your high and honorable office, and which has deepened in
the course of the eventful years of your presidency."

The Rev. Mr. Booth then reviewed the landing of the Pilgrim
Fathers and the establishment of religious liberty in America.

"These men," he said, "laid the foundations for that great love
of liberty and justice which has made the American people and which
has found such practical expression in so signally helping to the great
victory in the European struggle against oppression and wrong. Is
it not a further manifestation of the same spirit which, in the Provi-
dence of God, is leading the world's conscience in its groping after
universal peace?

"Mr. President, our prayers for you ascend; our love to you is
given, and our praise of you shall be sounded as long as we have breath.

"We all want to hear your voice. Won't you say a few words
to us?" ^

The President then responded in the following words:

It is with unaffected reluctance that I inject myself into
this service. I remember my grandfather very well, and,
remembering him, I can see how he would not approve. I
remember what he required of me and remember the stem
lesson of duty he spoke. And I remember painfully about
things he expected me to know that I did not know.

96 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

There has come a change of times when laymen like
myself are permitted to speak in a congregation. There is
another reason why I was reluctant to speak.

The feelings excited in me to-day are really too intimate
and too deep to permit of public expression. The memories
that come of the mother who was bom here are very affect-
ing. Her quiet character, her sense of duty, and her dis-
like of ostentation have come back to me with increasing
force as these years of duty have accumulated. Yet per-
haps it is appropriate that in a place of worship I should
acknowledge my indebtedness to her and her remarkable
father, because, after all, what the world now is seeking to
do is to return to the paths of duty, to turn from the savagery
of interests to the dignity of the performance of right.

I believe as this war has drawn nations temporarily
together in a combination of physical force, we shall now be
drawn together in a combination of moral force that is
irresistible. It is moral force as much as physical force
that has defeated the effort to subdue the world. Words
have cut as deep as swords.

The knowledge that wrong has been attempted has
aroused the nations. They have gone out like men for a
crusade. No other cause could have drawn so many of
the nations together. They knew an outlaw was abroad
and that the outlaw purposed unspeakable things.

It is from quiet places like this all over the world that
the forces are accumulated that presently will overpower
any attempt to accomplish evil on a great scale. It is like
the rivulet that gathers into the river and the river that
goes to the sea. So there come out of communities like
these streams that fertilize the conscience of men, and it
is the conscience of the world we now mean to place upon
the throne which others tried to usurp.

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 97
MANCHESTER

At Manchester, in the great county of Lancashire, the heart of
British radicalism, the home of Cobden and Bright, the center of
the cotton-spinning and coal-mining industries of the North of Eng-
land, President Wilson made his longest and one of his most impor-
tant speeches.

A former member of Parliament from Manchester, Colonel Worsley,
was famous as the man to whom Oliver Cromwell gave the command
to "remove that bauble" (the mace) from the clerk's table at West-
minster, as his mandate to dissolve the Parliament in 1654.

While in Manchester the President took a trip through the famous
Ship Canal, ten miles long, which connects Manchester with the sea
at Eastham, near Liverpool. The canal was begun in 1894 and cost
over $82,000,000.

The large Free Trade Hall, seating over five thousand, was packed
when the President spoke there on December 30 as follows:

IN THE FREE TRADE HALL

My Lord Mayor, Ladies and Gentlemen — perhaps I may
be permitted to add, Fellow Citizens: You have made me
feel in a way that is deeply delightful the generous welcome
which you have accorded me, and back of it I know there
lies the same sort of feeling for the great people whom I have
the privilege of representing.

There is a feeling of cordiality, fraternity, and friendship
between the two great nations, and as I have gone from
place to place and been made everywhere to feel the pulse
of sympathy that is now beating between us, I have been
led to some very serious thoughts as to what the basis of
it all is. For I think you will agree with me that friend-
ship is not a mere sentiment.

Patriotism is not a mere sentiment. It is based upon a
principle ; upon the principle that leads a man to give more
than he demands. Similarly friendship is based not merely
upon affection, but upon common service. The man is not

98 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

your friend who is not willing to serve you, and you are
not his friend unless you are willing to serve him. And
out of that impulse of common interest and desire of common
service arises that noble feeling which consecrates friend-
ship.

And so it does seem to me that the theme that we must
have in our minds now in this great day of settlement is
the theme of common interest, and the determination of
what it is that is our common interest.

You know that heretofore the world has been governed,
or at any rate the attempt has been made to govern it, by
partnerships of interest and that they have broken down.
Interest does not bind men together. Interest separates
men. For the moment there is the slightest departure
from the nice adjustment of interest, then jealousies begin
to spring up.

There is only one thing that can bind peoples together,
and that is a common devotion to right. Ever since the
history of liberty began, men have talked about their rights,
and it has taken several hundred years to make them per-
ceive that the principal condition of right is duty, and that
unless a man performs his full duty he is entitled to no right.

It is a fine corollation of the influence of duty that right
is the equipoise and balance of society. And so when we
analyze the present situation and the future that we now
have to mold and control, it seems to me there is no other
thought than that that can guide us.

You know that the United States has always felt from
the very beginning of her story that she must keep herself
separate from any kind of connection with European politics.
I want to say very frankly to you that she is not now inter-
ested in European politics, but she is interested in the
partnership of right between America and Europe.

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 99

If the future had nothing for us but a new attempt to
keep the world at a right poivSe by a balance of power, the
United States would take no interest, because she will
join.no combination of power which is not a combination
of all of us. She is not interested merely in the peace of
Europe, but in the peace of the world.

Therefore it seems to me that in the settlement which
is just ahead of us something more delicate and difficult
than was ever attempted before has to be accomplished — -a
genuine concert of mind and of purpose.

But, while it is difficult, there is an element present that
makes it easy. Never before in the history of the world,
I believe, has there been such a keen international con-
sciousness as there is now. Men all over the world have
been embarrassed by international antagonism.

There is a great voice in htunanity abroad in the world
just now which he who cannot hear is deaf. There is a
great compulsion of the common conscience now in existence
which if any statesman resist, he will gain the most unenvi-
able eminence in history. We are not obeying the mandate
of parties or of politics. We are obeying the mandate of
humanity.

I am not hopeful that the individual items of the settle-
ment which we are about to attempt will be altogether
satisfactory. One has only to apply his mind to any one
of the questions of boundary and of altered sovereignty and
of racial aspirations to do something more than conjecture
that there is no man and no body of men who know just
how they ought to be settled; and yet if we are to make
unsatisfactory settlements we must see to it that they are
rendered more and more satisfactory by the subsequent
adjustments which are made possible.

We must provide the machinery for readjustment in order

100 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONvS

that we have the machinery of good will and friendship.
Friendship must have a machinery. If I cannot correspond
with you, if I cannot learn your mind, if I cannot cooperate
with you, I cannot be your friend; and if the world is to
remain a body of friends, it must have the means of friend-
ship, the means of constant friendly intercourse, the means
for constant watchfulness over the common interests.

That makes it necessary" to make some great effort to
have with one another an easy and constant method of
conference so that troubles may be taken when they are
little and not allowed to grow until they are big.

I never had a big difference with a man that I did not
find when I came into conference with him that after all
it was rather a little difference, and that if we were frank
with one another and did not too much stand upon that
great enemy of mankind which is called pride we could
come together.

It is the wish to come together that is more than half
of the process. It is a doctrine which ought to be easy
of comprehension in a great commercial center like this.
You cannot trade with a man who suspects you. You
cannot establish commercial and industrial relations with
those who do not trust you.

Good will is the forerunner of trade. Good will is the
foundation of trade, and trade is the great amicable instru-
ment of the world on that account.

I felt before I came here at home in Manchester — because
Manchester has so many of the characteristics of our great
American cities. I was reminded of an anecdote of a
humorous fellow countryman of mine who was sitting at
luncheon in his club one day and a man whom he did not
like particularly came up and slapped him on the shoulders
and said, ** Hullo, Olley, how are you?" He looked at

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AISfD RESPONSES. ,'291,

him coldly and said, *'I don't know your face and I don't
know your name, but your manners are very familiar."

I don't know your name, but your manners are very
delightfully familiar. So that I felt that in the community
of interest and understanding which is established in great
currents of trade we are enabled to see international progress
perhaps better than they can be seen by others. I take it
I am not far from right in supposing that is the reason why
Manchester has been the center of the great forward-looking
sentiments of men who had the instinct of large planning,
not merely for the city itself, but for the kingdom and the
empire and the world. And with that outlook, we can be
sure we can go shoulder and shoulder together.

I wish it were possible for us to do something such as some
of my very stern ancestors did, for among my ancestors
are those very determined persons who were known as the
Covenanters. I wish we could, not for Great Britain and
the United States, but for France, for Italy, and the world,
enter into a great league and covenant declaring ourselves
first of all friends of mankind and uniting ourselves together
for the maintenance of the triumph of rights.

AT THE MIDLAND HOTEL

At a luncheon of prominent men in the Midland Hotel, Manchester,
December 30, President Wilson said:

It is very interesting that the Lord Mayor should have
referred in his address to very vital circumstances in our
friendship. He referred to the fact that our men and your
men have fought side by side in the great battles. But
there was more than that in it. For the first time, tipon
such a scale at any rate, they have fought under a common
commander. That is an advance which ^e have made upon
the previous days, and what I have been particularly interested

,102: c'. /AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

in has been the generosity of spirit with which that unity of
command has been assented to. I not only had the pleasure
of meeting Marshal Foch, who confirmed my admiration of
him by the direct and simple manner with which he dealt
with every subject we talked about, but I had the pleasure
of meeting your own commander, and I understand how
they cooperated, because I saw they were real men.

It takes a real man to subordinate himself, and it takes
a real soldier to know t];iat unity of command is the secret
of success. That unity of command did swing the power
of nations into a mighty force. I think we all must have
felt how the momentum which got into all of the armies
was concentrated into the single army, and we felt we had
overcome all the obstacles.

With our unity of command there arose a unity of spirit.
The minute we consented to cooperate, our hearts were drawn
closer together into cooperation, and so from the military
side we had giVen otirselves an example for the years to
come. Not tha|t in the years to come we must submit to
a unity of command, but it does seem to me that in the years
to come we must plan a unity of purpose, and in that unity
of ptirpose we shill find a great recompense, a strengthening
of our spirit in everything that we do.

There is nothing so hampering and nothing so debasing
as jealousy. It k sl cancer in the heart. Not only that,
but it is a cancer in the counting room. It is a cancer
throughout all the processes of civilization, and having now
seen we can fight shoulder to shoulder we will continue to
advance shoulder Ito shoulder, and I think you will find
that the people of pe United States are not the least eager
for the purpose.

I remember heaing the story of a warning that one of
your Australian solfliers gave to one of ours. Our soldiers

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 103

were considered by the older men to be a bit rash when
they were in the field. I understand that one friendly
Australian said that our men were rather rough. On one
occasion an Australian said to one of our men: "Man, a
barrage is not a thing to lean up against."

They were a little bit inclined to lean up against the
barrage, and yet I must confide to you that I was a bit
proud of them for it. They had come over to get at the
enemy and they didn't know why they should delay.

But now that there is no* common enemy except distrust
and marring of plans, we can all feel the same eagerness
in the new combat and feel that there is a common enter-
prise before us.

We are not men because we have skill of hand, but we
are men because we have elevation of spirit. It is in this
spirit that we live and not in the task of the day. If it is
not that, why is it that you hang the lad's musket or sword
above the mantelpiece,- but never hang the yardstick up?

There is nothing discreditable in the yardstick. It is
altogether honorable, but he is using it for his own sake.
But when he takes the musket or the sword he is giving
everything and is getting nothing. It is honorable, not as
an instrument, but as a symbol of self-sacrifice.

A friend of mine said very truly: **When peace is con-
ducted in the spirit of war, there will be no war.'* When
business is done with the point of view of the soldier who is
serving his country, then business will be as histrionic as war.

I believe that from generation to generation steps of that
sort are gaining more and more, and men are beginning to
see, not, perhaps, the Golden Age, but an age which is con-
ducting them from victory to victory and may lead us to
an elevation from which we can see the things for which
the heart of mankind has longed.

104 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS
THE ETERNAL CITY

Civis Romanus sum used to be the proud boast of the eitizen of
Rome when the city on the seven hills was mistress of the world.
Much of ''the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was
Rome have departed, but Italy, under her democratic and farseeing
King, Victor Emmanuel, is experiencing a veritable renascence.

It was with this thought in mind that President Wilson addressed the
members of the Chamber of Deputies on January 3.

AT THE QUIRINAL PALACE

President Wilson was the guest of honor at an official dinner given
at the Quirinal. There were only two addresses, by King Victor
Emmanuel and by Mr. Wilson. The King said:.

[' You, yourself, Mr. President, are become our welcome
and pleasing guest only to-day, but in the conscience of
our people your personality already for a long time has
inscribed itself in an ineffaceable way. It is that which
in itself gathers all the powers which go to stimulate a
will bent on liberty and justice and gives inspiration toward
the highest conception of the destinies of humanity.

The enthusiastic salutations which have accompanied
your passage through the streets of Rome to-day are attes-
tations of the sentiments of admiration and recognition
that your own name and labor and the name and labor of
the United States stir in the Italian people. The principles
in which you in magnificent synthesis have summed up
the ideal reasons of the war for liberty find resonance in
Italian hearts.

The best traditions of Italian culture, the liveliest currents
of our national thoughts, have constantly aimed at the
same ideal goal — toward the establishment of the inter-
national peace for which you have with tenacious faith
stood. Already before the vicissitudes of war and the

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 105

fraternity of armies had established to-day's admirable
communion of intentions and purposes between our two
countries, legions of our workers had emigrated to your
great Republic. They had knitted America and Italy
together with strong cords of relationships, and these
became reinforced by the spiritual affinity between both
peoples, who had a common faith in the virtue of free
political government.

When Italy entered into the war, a breath, a precursor
of the American soul, penetrated into the rank and file of
our army through the means of our workers who returned to
the fatherland from America and brought into Italy an echo
of their second patria. So, correspondingly, the Italian soul
vibrated in the hearts of our emigrants enrolled under your
banners when the American nation under your guidance
threw itself into the fight against the common enemy.

It was natural that your visit, awaited with a most
earnest desire, should now give form and expression almost
tangible to this fervid agreement of spirits, to this happy
communion of intentions and of ideals, forming themselves
between the two peoples, and which are employed in a
union always more intimate and a cooperation always
more cordial in the face of the grave duties imposed by
the common victory. Italy, having now gathered to her
own bosom those brothers so long sorrowing under foreign
oppression, and having reconquered the confines which
alone can give her security and true independence, is pre-
paring herself to cooperate with you in the most cordial
manner to reach the most practical means for drawing
into a single circle the civilized nations, for the purpose of
creating in the supreme form of a League of Nations the
conditions most fitting to safeguard and protect each one's
rights. Italy and America entered together into the war

it)6 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

through a rare act of will ; they were moved by the purpose
to conciu* with all their energies in an effort to prevent the
domination of the cult of force in the world; they were
moved by the purpose to reaffirm in the scale of human
values the principles of liberty and justice. They entered
into war to conquer the powers of war. Their accomplish-
ment is still unfinished, and the common work must still
be developed with firm faith and with tenacious constancy
for the purpose of affecting the security of peace.

I lift up my glass, Mr. President, in your honor and in the
honor of Mrs. Wilson, whose gentle presence adds charm
to your visit; I drink to the prosperity and to the contin-
ued and increasing prestige of the great American nation.

REPLY BY PRESIDENT WILSON

Your Majesty: I have been very much touched by the
generous terms of the address, you have just read. I feel
it would be difficult for me to make a worthy reply, and
yet if I could speak simply the things that are in my heart
I am sure they could constitute an adequate reply.

I had occasion at the Parliament this afternoon to speak
of the strong sympathy that had sprung up between the
United States and Italy during the terrible years of the
war, but perhaps here I can speak more intimately and say
how sincerely the people of the United States had admired
your own course and yotir own constant association with
the armies of Italy, and the gracious and generous and
serving association of Her Majesty the Queen.

It has been a matter of pride with us that so many Italians,
so many men of Italian origin, were in our own armies and
associated with their brethren in Italy itself in the great
enterprise of freedom. These are no small matters, and

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 107

they complete that process of the welding together of the
sympathies of nations which has been going on so long
between our peoples.

The Italians in the United States have excited a particular
degree of admiration. They, I believe, are the only people
of a given nationality who have been careful to organize
themselves to see that their compatriots coming to America
were from month to month and year to year guided to
places in industries most suitable to their previous habits.
No other nationality has taken such pains as that, and in
serving their fellow countrymen they have served the
United States, because these people have found places
where they would be most useful and would most imme-
diately earn their own living and add to the prosperity of
the country itself.

In every way we have been happy in our association at
home and abroad with the people of this great state. I
was saying, playfully, to Premier Orlando and Baron
Sonnino this afternoon that in trying to put the people of
the world under their proper sovereignties we would not
be willing to part with the Italians in the United States,
because we too much value the contribution that they have
made, not only to the industry of the United States, but
to its thought and to many elements of its life.

This is, therefore, a very welcome occasion upon which
to express a feeling that goes very deep. I was touched
the other day to have an Italian, a very plain man, say to
me that we had helped to feed Italy during the war, and
it went to my heart, because we had been able to do so
little. It was necessary for us to use our tonnage so exclu-
sively for the handling of troops and of the supplies that
had to follow them from the United States that we could
not do half as much as it was our desire to do, to supply

io8 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

grain to this country, or coal, or any of the suppHes which
it so much needed during the progress of the war.

And knowing as we did in this direct way the needs of
the country, you will not wonder that we were moved by
its steadfastness. My heart goes out to the little poor
families all over this great kingdom who stood the brunt
and the strain of the war and gave their men gladly to
make other men free and other women and other children
free. These are the people and many like them to whom,
after all, we owe the glory of this great achievement, and
I want to join with you, for I am sure of joining with you,
in expressing my profound sympathy not only, but my
very profound admiration as well.

It is my privilege and honor to propose the health of
His Majesty the King and Her Majesty the Queen, and
long prosperity to Italy.

IN THE CHAMBER OF DEPUTIES

Your Majesty and Mr. President of the Chamber: You
are bestowing upon me an unprecedented honor, which I
accept because I believe that it is extended to me as the
representative of the great people for whom I speak. And
I am going to take this first opportunity to say how entirely
the heart of the American people has been with the great
people of Italy.

We have seemed no doubt indifferent at times, to look
from a great distance, but our hearts have never been far
away. All sorts of ties have long bound the people of our
America to the people of Italy, and when the people of the
United States, knowing this people, have witnessed its
sufferings, its sacrifices, its heroic actions upon the battle-
field, and its heroic endurance at home — its steadfast

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 109

endurance at home touching us more nearly to the quick
even than its heroic action on the battlefield — we have
been bound by a new tie of profound admiration.

Then back of it all, and through it all, running like the
golden thread that wove it together, was our knowledge
that the people of Italy had gone into this war for the same
exalted principle of right and justice that moved our own
people. And so I welcome this opportunity of conveying
to you the heartfelt greetings of the people of the United
States.

But we cannot stand in the shadow of this war without
knowing there are things which are in some senses more
difficult than those we have undertaken, because, while
it is easy to speak of right and justice, it is sometimes
difficult to work them out in practice, and there will be
required a purity of motives and disinterestedness of object
which the world has never witnessed before in the councils
of nations.

It is for that reason that it seems to me you will forgive
me if I lay some of the elements of the new situation before
you for a moment. The distinguishing fact of this war
is that great empires have gone to pieces. And the char-
acteristics of those empires are that they held different
peoples reluctantly together under the coercion of force
and the guidance of intrigue.

The great difficulty among such states as those of the
Balkans has been that they were always accessible to secret
influence ; that they were always being penetrated by intrigue
of some sort or another; that north of them lay disturbed
populations which were held together, not by sympathy and
friendship, but by the coercive force of a military power.

Now the intrigue is checked and the bands are broken,
and what we are going to provide is a new cement to hold

^10 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OP NATIONS

the people together. They have not been accustomed to
being independent. They mUvSt now be independent.

I am sure that you recognize the principle as I do — that
it is not our privilege to say what sort of a government
they should set up. But we are friends of those people,
and it is our duty as their friends to see to it that some kind
of protection is thrown around them — something supplied
which will hold them together.

There is only one thing that holds nations together, if
you exclude force, and that is friendship and good will.
The only thing that binds men together is friendship, and
by the same token the only thing that binds nations together
is friendship. Therefore our task at Paris is to organize
the friendship of the world — to see to it that all the moral
forces that make for right and justice and liberty are united
and are given a vital organization to which the peoples of
the world will readily and gladly respond.

In other words, our task is no less colossal than this: To
set up a new international psychology; to have a new real
atmosphere. I am happy to say that, in my dealings
with the distinguished gentlemen who lead your nation, and
those who lead France and England, I feel that atmosphere
gathering, that desire to do justice, that desire to estab-
lish friendliness, that desire to make peace rest upon right;
and with this common purpose no obstacles need be
formidable.

The only use of an obstacle is to be overcome. All that
an obstacle does with brave men is not to frighten them,
but to challenge them. So that it ought to be our pride
to overcome everything that stands in the way.

We know that there cannot be another balance of power.
That has been tried and found wanting, for the best of all
reasons — that it does not stay balanced inside itself; and

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES iii

a weight which does not hold together cannot constitute
a make-weight in the affairs of men.

Therefore there must be something substituted for the
balance of power, and I am happy to find everywhere in
the air of these great nations the conception that that
thing must be a thoroughly united League of Nations.

What men once considered theoretical and idealistic turns
out to be practical and necessary. We stand at the opening
of a new age in which a new statesmanship will, I am con-
fident, lift mankind to new levels of endeavor and achieve-
ment.

TO ITALIAN JOURNALISTS

Let me thank you, gentlemen, very warmly for this
stirring address, because it goes straight to my heart as well
as to my understanding. If I had known that this impor-
tant delegation was coming to see me, I would have tried
to say something worthy of the occasion. As it is, I can
only say that my purpose is certainly expressed in that
paper, and I believe that the purpose of those associates
at Paris is a common purpose. Justice and right are big
things. And in these circumstances they are big with
difficulty.

Understand. I am not foolish enough to suppose that
our decisions will be easy to arrive at, but the principles
upon which they are to be arrived at ought to be indis-
putable, and I have the conviction that if we do not risq
to the expectations of the world and satisfy the souls of
great peoples like the people of Italy, we shall have the
most unenviable distinction in history. Because what is
happening now is that the soul of one people is crying to
the soul of another, and no people in the world with whose
sentiments I am acquainted want a bargaining settlement.
They all want settlements based upon right.

112 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

AT THE MUNICIPAL PALAGE

Following the ceremony during which he became a citizen of Rome
on January 3, President Wilson spoke as follows:

You have done me a very great honor. Perhaps you can
imagine what a feeHng it is for a citizen of one of the newest
of the great nations to be made a citizen of this ancient
city. It is a distinction which I am sure you are conferring
upon me as a representative of the great people for whom
I speak. One who has been a student of history cannot
accept an honor of the sort without having his memory
run back to the extraordinary series of events which have
centered in this place.

But as I have thought to-day I have been impressed by
the contrast between the temporary and permanent things.
Many poHtical changes have centered about Rome, from
the time when from a little city she grew to be mistress of
a great empire. Change after change has swept away
many things, altering the very form of her affairs, but
the thing that has remained permanent has been the
spirit of Rome and the ItaHan people. That spirit seems
to have caught with each age the characteristic purpose
of the age.

This imperial people now gladly represents the freedom
of nations. This people, which at one time seemed to con-
ceive the purpose of governing the world, now* takes part
in the liberal enterprise of offering the world its own govern-
ment. Can there be a finer or more impressive illustration
of the indestructible htiman spirit and of the unconquerable
spirit of liberty?

I have been reflecting in these recent days about a colossal
blunder whichhas been made — the blunder of force by the

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 113

Central Empires. If Germany had waited a single genera-
tion, she would have had a commercial empire of the world.
She was not willing to conquer by skill, by enterprise, by
commercial success. She must needs attempt to conquer
the world by arms, and the world will always acclaim the
fact that it is impossible to conquer by arms; that the
only thing that conquers is the sort of service which can
be rendered in trade, in intercourse, in friendship, and that
there is no conquering power which can suppress the freedom
of the human spirit.

I have rejoiced personally in the partnership of the Italian
and American people, because it is a new partnership in
an old enterprise, an enterprise predestined to succeed
wherever it is undertaken — the enterprise which has always
borne that handsome name which we call ''liberty." Men
have pursued it sometimes like a mirage that seemed to
elude them, that seemed to run before them as they advanced,
but never have they flagged in their purpose to achieve it,
and I believe I am not deceived in supposing that in this
age of ours they are nearer to it than they ever were before.
The light that shone upon the summit now seems to shine
almost at our feet, and if we lose it, it will only be because
we have lost faith. A breath of hope and of confidence
has come into the hearts and minds of men.

I would not have felt at liberty to come away from
America if I had not felt that the time had arrived when,
forgetting local interests and local ties and local purposes,
men should unite in this great enterprise that will ever tie
free men together as a body of brethren and a body of free
spirits.

I am honored, sir, to be taken into this ancient comrade-
ship of the citizenship of Rome.

114 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

MILAN

Milan, in Lombardy, is the financial center of Italy. It is a great
railway junction. Consequently its trade is vast and varied, espe-
cially in machinery and textiles of all sorts. The Milanese have
ever been independent and radical in politics and were the first to
take part in the revolution of 1848. After Solferino and Magenta,
Milan became part of the kingdom of modem Italy. The famous
cathedral was begun in 1386 and it took six centuries to complete it.

ON HIS ARRIVAL

Speaking at the station on his arrival at Milan, on January 6, the
President said:

Ladies and Gentlemen: You make my heart very warm
indeed by a welcome like this, and I know the significance
of this sort of a welcome in Milan, because I know how the
hearts of Italy and of the Italian people beat strong here.
It is delightful to feel how our thoughts have turned toward
you from not a new but an ancient friendship; because the
American people have long felt the pulse of Italy beat
with their ptdse with desire for freedom.

We have been students of your history. We know the
vicissitudes and struggles through which you have passed.
We know that no nation has more steadfastly held to a
single course of freedom in its desires and its efforts than
have the people of Italy, and therefore I come to this place,
where the life of Italy seems to beat so strong, with a peculiar
gratification.

I feel that I am privileged to come into contact with you,
and I want you to know how the words I am uttering of
sympathy and of friendship are not my own alone, but
they are the words of the people whom I represent.

I was saying a little while ago at the monument of Colimi-
bus that he did a great thing, greater than was ever realized
at the time it was done. He discovered a new continent

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 115

not only, but he opened it to the children of freedom, and
these children are now privileged to come back to their
mother and to assist her in the high enterprise upon which
her heart has always been set. It is therefore with the
deepest gratification that I find myself here and thank
you for your generous welcome.

TO ITALIAN MOTHERS AND WIDOWS

At Milan the President spoke to the League of Mothers and Widows,
saying :

I am very much touched by this evidence of your con-
fidence, and I would like to express to you, if I could, the
very deep sympathy I have for those who have suffered
irreparable losses in Italy.

Our hearts have been touched and you have used the
right word. Your men have come with the spirit of the
crusaders against that which was wrong and in order to see
to it, if it was possible, that such terrible things never would
happen again. I am very grateful to you for your kindness,

AT THE ROYAL PALACE

In speaking to a large delegation which welcomed him to Milan,
at the Royal Palace, the President said:

I cannot tell you how much complimented I am by your
coming in person to give me this greeting. I have never
known such a greeting as the people of Milan have given
me on the streets. It has brought tears to my eyes, because
I know that it comes from their hearts.

I can see in their faces the same things that I feel toward
them, and I know that it is an impulse of their friendship
toward the nation I represent as well as a gracious welcome
to myself. I want to re-echo the hope that we may all

Ii6 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

work together for a great peace as distinguished from a
mean peace. May I suggest that this is a great deal in
my thoughts.

The world is not going to consist now of great empires.
It is going to consist for the most part of small nations
apparently, and the only thing that can bind small nations
together is the knowledge that each wants to treat the
others fairly. That is .the only thing. The world has
already shown that its progress is industrial. You cannot
trade with people whom you do not trust and who do not
trust you.

Confidence is the basis of everything that we must do,
and it is a delightful feeling that these ideals are sustained
by the people of Italy and by a wonderful body of people
such as you have in the great city of Milan. It is with a
sense of added encouragement and strength that I return
to Paris to take part in the council that will determine the
items of the peace. I thank you with all my heart.

TO THE COMMITTEE OF ENTERTAINMENT

Mr. Chairman: Again you have been very gracious and
again you have filled my heart with gratitude because of
your reference to my country, which is so dear to me. I
have been very much interested to be told, sir, that you
are the chairman of the Committee of Entertainment,
which includes all parties without distinction, and I am
glad to interpret that to mean that there is no division
recognized in the friendship which you have for America,
and I am sure, sir, that I can assure you that in America
there would be a similar union of all parties to express
friendship and sympathy with Italy, because, after all,
parties are founded upon differences of program and not
often upon differences of national sympathy.

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 117

This is what gives imperishable victory, and with that
victory have come about things that are exemplified in
scenes like this — the coming together of the hearts of nations
and the sympathy of great bodies of people who do not
speak the same vocabulary but speak the same ideas. I
am heartened by this delightful experience and hope that
you will accept not only many thanks for myself and for
thdse who are with me, but thanks on behalf of the American
people.

A CITIZEN OF MILAN

The President's speech on the occasion of his acceptance of an
honorary citizenship of Milan follows:

Mr. Mayor: May I not say to you, as the representative
of this great city, that it is impossible for me to put into
words the impressions I have received to-day. The over-
whelming welcome, the spontaneous welcome, which so
evidently came from the heart, has been profoundly moving
to me, sir, and I have not failed to see the significance of
that welcome. You have yourself referred to it.

I am as keenly aware, I believe, sir, as anybody can be
that the social structure rests upon the great working classes
of the world ; that those working classes in the several coun-
tries of the world have, by their consciousness of a community
of interest, by their consciousness of a community of spirit,
done perhaps more than any other influence has to establish
world opinion, which is not of the nation, not of the conti-
nent, but is the opinion, one might say, of mankind, and I
am aware, sir, that those of us now charged with the very
great and serious responsibility of * concluding peace must
think, act, and confer in the presence of this opinion — that
we are not the masters of the fortunes of any nation, but
are the servants of mankind; that it is not our privilege to

Ii8 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

follow special interests, but it is our manifest duty to study
only the general interest.

This is a solemn thing, sir, and here in Milan, where I
know so much of the pulse of international sympathy beats,
I am glad to stand up and say that I believe that pulse
beats also in my own veins, and that I am not thinking of
the particulars of the settlement.

I am very much touched to-day, sir, to receive at the
hands of wounded soldiers a memorial in favor of the League
of Nations and be told by them that was what they had
fought for — not merely to win the war, but to secure some-
thing beyond; some guaranties of justice, some equilibriimi
for the world as a whole which would make it certain that
they would never have to fight a war like this again. This is
an added obligation upon us who make peace. We cannot
merely sign a treaty of peace and go home with a clear con-
science. We must do something more. We must add so
far as we can the securities which suffering men everywhere
demand.

I take my hat off to the great people of Italy and tell
them my admiration has merged into friendship and affec-
tion. It is in this spirit that I receive your courtesy, sir, and
thank you from the bottom of my heart for this unpre-
cedented reception which I have received at the hands of
your generous people.

FROM LA SCALA BALCONY

I wish I could take you all to some place where a similar
body of my fellow countrymen could show their heart
toward you as you have shown me your heart toward them,
because the heart of America has gone out to the heart of
Italy. We have been watchful of your heroic struggle

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 119

and of your heroic sufferings, and it has been our joy in
these recent days to be associated with you in the victory
which has liberated Italy and liberated the world. Viva
r Italia!

TO THE MILANESE PUBLIC

The thing that makes parties workable and tolerable is
that all parties love their own country and, therefore,
participate in the general sentiments of that country, and
so it is with us, sir. We have many parties, but we have a
single sentiment in this war and a single sentiment in the
peace, and in that sentiment lies our feeling toward those
with whom we have been associated in the great struggle.
At first the struggle seemed to be a natural resistance to an
aggressive force, but as the consciousness of the nation
grew it became more and more apparent that in the agres-
sion of the Central Empires was the spirit of militarism, the
spirit of autocracy, the spirit of force, and against that
spirit there arose, as always in the past, the spirit of liberty
and justice.

Force can always be conquered, but the spirit of liberty
can never be; and the beautiful circimistance about the
history of liberty is that its champions have always shown
the power of self-sacrifice. They have always been willing
to subordinate their personal interests to the common good
and have not wished to dominate their fellow men, but
have wished to serve them.

I20 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONvS

GENOA

Genoa is the chief port and the largest commercial city of Italy.
Had it been able to give Columbus the support he asked, the New World
might have belonged to Italy instead of to Spain. But Genoa was
partially compensated for this loss by becoming the financial backer
of Spain in the period of her colonial expansion.

Giuseppe Mazzini was born in Genoa and struggled hard to keep
alive its republican spirit. Mazzini (i 805-1 872) was the prophet of
Italian unity and independence, Garibaldi its knight-errant, and
Cavour its creator. Mazzini was called by Carlyle * ' a man of genius and
virtue — a martyr soul." Driven from Italy, he lived in London for
many years. A sturdy republican and a devout Christian, Mazzini kept
alive the spirit of democracy in Europe which, even now, is bearing
rich fruit in his native land.

AT THE MAZZINI MONUMENT

I am very much moved sir, to be in the presence of this
monument. On the other side of the water we have studied
the life of Mazzini with almost as much pride as if we shared
in the glory of his history, and I am very glad to acknowledge
that his spirit has been handed down to us of a later genera-
tion on both sides of the water.

It is delightful to me to feel that I am taking some part
in accomplishing the realization of the ideals to which his
life and thought were devoted. It is with a spirit of ven-
eration, sir, and with a spirit, I hope, of emulation, that I
stand in the presence of this monument and bring my greet-
ings and the greetings of America with our homage to the
great Mazzini.

GIFT OF MAZZINFS WORKS

The writings of Mazzini are very voluminous. Besides much journal-
istic and propaganda work he wrote the following hooks, probably
among those presented to President Wilson: Italian Literature since

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 121

18 jo; Paolo Sarpi; Lamennais; George Sand; Byron and Goethe;
Lamartine; Carlyle; Minor Works of Dante; On the Duties of Man, and
Life and Writings (autobiography).

Mr. Mayor: It is with many feelings of a very deep sort,
perhaps too deep for adequate expression, that I find my-
self in Genoa, which is a natural shrine for Americans. The
connections of America with Genoa are so many and so
significant that in some sense it may be said that we drew
our life and beginnings from this city.

You can realize, therefore, sir, with what emotion I
receive the honor which you have so generously conferred
upon me in the citizenship of this great city. In a way it
seems natural for an American to be a citizen of Genoa, and
I shall always count it among the most delightful associa-
tions of my life that you should have conferred this honor
upon me, and, in taking away this beautiful edition of the
works of Mazzini, I hope that I shall derive inspiration
from this volume as I already have derived guidance from
the principles which Mazzini so eloquently expressed.

It is delightful to feel how the voice of one people speaks
to another through the mouths of men who have by some
gift of God been lifted above the common level; and,
therefore, these words of your prophet and leader will, I
hope, be deeply planted in the hearts of my fellow country-
men. There is already planted in those hearts, sir, a very
deep and genuine affection for the great Italian people, and
the thoughts of my own nation turn constantly, as we read
our history, to this delightful and distinguished city.

May I not thank you, sir, for myself and for Mrs. Wilson,
and for my daughter, for the very gracious welcome you have
accorded us, and express my pride and pleasure.

122 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

AT THE COLUMBUS STATUE

Near the Piazza Acquaverde, among a grove of palm trees, is a
noble statue of Columbus, at whose feet kneels the figure of America.
At Colimibus Circle, at the intersection of Fifty-ninth Street and
Seventh Avenue, in New York City, there is a monimient to Columbus,
erected in 1894 t>y the Italian residents of the city, from the design
of Gaetano Russo.

Standing in front of this monument, sir, I fully recognize
the significance of what you have said. Columbus did
do a service to mankind in discovering America, and it is
America's pleasure and America's pride that she has been
able to show that it was a service to mankind to open that
great continent to settlement, the settlement of a free
people, of a people who, because they are free, desire to see
other peoples free and to share their liberty with the people
of the world.

It is for this reason, no doubt, besides his fine spirit of
adventure, that Columbus will always be remembered and
honored, not only here in the land of his birth, but through-
out the world, as the man who led the way to those fields
of freedom which, planted with a great seed, have now
sprung up to the fructification of the world.

TURIN

Turin was the capital of Sardinia until i860 and of Italy until 1865.
It is quite modem in appearance, its streets being laid out in American
fashion, at right angles. It is the center of the automobile industry
in Italy and leads in the commercial use of electricity. The university
of Ttirin was founded in 1400 and is attended by over twenty-five
hundred students. Many of its present buildings were erected in
1 713. Others have been subsequently added.

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 123
THE GUEST OF THE CITY

As I passed through your streets I had this sensation, a
sensation which I have often had in my own dear country
at home, a sensation of friendship and of close sympathetic
contact. I could have believed myself in an American
city. I felt more than that. I felt what I have also felt
at home, that the real blood of the republic flowed in the
veins of these plain people who, more than some of the rest
of us, have borne the stress and burden of war.

Think of the price at which you and at which I have
purchased the victory which we have won. Think of the
price of blood and treasure not only, but the price of tears
and the price of hunger on the part of little children, of the
hopes delayed or the dismayed prospects that bore heavy
upon the homes. Those of us who plan battles and those
of us who conceive political movements do not bear the
burden of them. We direct and the others execute. We
plan and the others perform, and the conquest of spirit
is greater than the conquest of arms.

These are the people that never let go. They say nothing.
•They live merely from day to day, determined that the
glory of Italy, or that the glory of the United States, shall
not depart from her.

I have been thinking as I passed through your streets
and stood here that this was the place of the labors of the
great Cavour, and I thought how impossible would have
been many of the things which have happened in Italy
since his day and how impossible the great achievements
of Italy in the last three years would have been without
the work of Cavour. Ever since I was a boy one of my
favorite portraits has been a portrait of Cavour, because
I have read of him and of the way in which his mind took

124 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

in the nations, and of the national scope of his strong,
determined, and patriotic endeavor that never allowed
obstacles to dismay and always stood at the side of the
King and planned the great things which the King was
enabled to accomplish.

And I had another thought. This is a great industrial
city. Perhaps you gentlemen think of the members of
your government and the members of other governments
who are going to confer in the city of Paris as the real makers
of war and^peace. But we are not. You are the makers
of war and peace. The pulse of the modern world' beats
on the farms, and in the mines, and in the factories. The
plans of the modern world are made in the counting house.
The men who do the business of the world now shape the
destinies of the world, and peace or war is now in a large
measure in the hands of those who conduct the commerce
of the world. That is one reason why, unless we establish
friendships, unless we establish sympathies, we clog all the
processes of modern life. I have several times said that
you cannot trade with a man who does not trust you. And
you will not trade with a man whom you do not trust.
Trust is the very vital life and breath of business, and sus- '
picion and unjust national rivalries stand in the way of
trade and stand in the way of industry.

A country is owned and dominated by the capital that
is invested in it. I do not need to instruct you gentlemen
in that fundamental idea. In proportion as foreign capital
comes in among you and takes its hold, in that proportion
does foreign influence come in and take its hold, and,
therefore, the processes of capital are in an 'actual sense
the processes of conquest.

I have only this suggestion before we go to Paris to

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 125

conclude a peace. You stay here to continue it. We can
start the peace, but it is your duty to continue it. We can
only make the large conclusions. You constantly transact
the detail which constitutes the processes or the life of a
nation.

And so it is very delightful to me to stand in this com-
pany and feel that we are not foreigners to each other. We
think the same thoughts, we entertain the same purposes,
we have the same ideals, and this war has done this ines-
timable service — it has brought the nations into close and
vital contact so that they feel the pulses that are in each
other and so that they know the purposes by which each
is animated.

We know in America a great deal about Italy because
we have so many Italians. Fellow citizens, when Baron
Sonnino (the Italian foreign minister) was arguing the
other day for the extension of the sovereignty of Italy over
the Italian populations, I said to him that I was sorry we
could not let you have New York, which, I understand, is
the greatest Italian city in the world. I am told that there
are more Italians in New York City than in any city in
Italy, and I am proud to be president of a nation which
contains so large an element of the Italian race, because as
a student of literature I know the genius that has originated
in this great nation, the genius of thought and of poetry
and philosophy and of music. I am happy to be a part of
the nation which is enriched and made better by the intro-
duction of such elements of genius and of inspiration.

May I not again thank the representatives of this great
city and the representatives of the government for the
welcome they have given me and say again, for I cannot
say it too often, "Viva T Italia."

126 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

AT THE UNIVERSITY

Mr. Rector, Gentlemen of the Faculties of the University,
Ladies and Gentlemen: It is with a feeling of being in very
familiar scenes that I come here to-day. As soon as I
entered the quadrangle and heard the voices of the students,
it seemed to me as if the greater part of my life had come
back to me, and I am particularly honored that this dis-
tinguished university should have received me among its
sons. It will always be a matter of pride with me to remem-
ber this association and the very generous words in which
these honors have been conferred upon me.

When I think seriously of the significance of a ceremony
like this, some very interesting reflections come to my
mind, because, after all, the comradeship of letters, the
intercommunications of thought, are among the permanent
things of the world.

There was a time when scholars, speaking in the beauti-
ful language in which the last address was made, were the
only international characters of the world; the time was
when there was only one international community, the
community of scholars. As ability to read and write was
extended, international intercommunication was extended.
But one permanent common possession has remained, and
that is the validity of sound thinking.

When men have thought along the lines of philosophy,
have had revealed to them the visions of poetry, have
» worked out in their studies the permanent lines of law,
have realized the great impulses of humanity, they then
begin to advance the human web which no power can
permanently tear and destroy.

And so, in being taken into the comradeship of this
university, I feel that I am being taken into one of these
things which will always bind the nations together. After

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 127

all, when we are seeking peace we are seeking nothing else
than this, that men shall think the same thoughts, govern
their conduct by the same impulse, entertain the same
purposes, love their own people, but also love humanity,
and, above all else, love that great and indestructible thing
which we call justice and right.

These things are greater than we are. These are our
real masters, for they dominate our spirits, and the uni-
versities will have forgotten their duty when they cease to
weave this immortal web. It is one of the chief griefs of
this great war that the universities of the Central Empires
used the thoughts of science to destroy mankind.

It is the duty of the great universities of Italy and of
the rest of the world to redeem science from this disgrace, to
show that the pulse of humanity also beats in the classroom,
that the pulse of htmianity also beats in the laboratory,
and that there are sought out, not the secrets of death, but
the secrets of life.

128 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS
THE PEACE CONFERENCE OPENS

In the reception hall of the French Foreign Office, on the Quai
d'Orsai, the Peace Conference was formally opened on January i8,
with an address by President Raymond Poincare.

Just at three o'clock a ruffle of drums and blare of trumpets announced
the approach of M. Poincare. The French President was escorted by
the group of premiers to the head of the table, while a hush fell upon
the assemblage as the moment arrived for the opening of the Congress.

It was exactly 3:03 when M. Poincare began his address and the
Peace Congress came into being. The entire assemblage stood as the
President spoke. M. Poincare spoke in an earnest, easy manner,
without declamatory effect, and, following usage, there was no applause
or interruption.

M. Poincare spoke in French, and when he had concluded, an inter-
preter read the presidential discourse in English.

As M. Poincare closed he turned to receive the congratulations of '
President Wilson and Premier Lloyd George, and then withdrew,
greeting each delegation as he retired.

ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT POINCARE

Gentlemen: France greets and thanks you for having
chosen as the seat of your labors the city which for more
than four years the enemy has made his principal miHtary
objective, and which the valor of the allied armies has
victoriously defended against unceasingly renewed offensives.

Permit me to see in your decision the homage of all the
nations that you represent toward a country which, more
than any other, has endured the sufferings of war, of which
entire provinces have been transformed into a waste battle-
field and have been systematically laid waste by the invader,
and which has paid the human tribute in death.

France has borne these enormous sacrifices, although she
had not the slightest responsibility for the frightful catas-
trophe which has overwhelmed the universe, and, at the
moment when the cycle of horror is ending, all the powers
whose delegates are assembled "here may acquit themselves

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 129

of any share in the crime which has resulted in so unpre-
cedented a disaster. What gives you the autliority to estab>
Hsh a peace of justice is the fact that none of the peoples
of whom you are the delegates has had any part in the
injustice. Humanity can place confidence in you, because
you are not among those who have outraged the rights of
humanity.

There is no need of further information of for special
inquiries into the origin of the drama which has just shaken
the world. The truth, bathed in blood, has already escaped
from the Imperial archives. The premeditated character
of the trap is to-day clearly proved.

In the hope of conquering first the hegemony of Europe
and next the mastery of the world, the Central Empires,
bound together by a secret plot, found the most abominable
of pretexts for trying to crush Serbia and force their way
to the East. At the same time they disowned the most
solemn undertakings in order to crush Belgium and force
their way into the heart of France.

These are the two unforgettable outrages which opened
the way to aggression. The combined efforts of Great
Britain, France, and Russia were exerted against that
man-made arrogance.

If, after long vicissitudes, those who wished to reign by
the sword have perished by the sword, they have but them-
selves to blame. They have been destroyed by their own
blindness. What could be more significant than the shame-
ful bargains they attempted to offer to Great Britain and
France at the end of July, 19 14, when to Great Britain
they suggested, ''Allow us to attack France on land and
we will not enter the Channel," and when they instructed
their ambassador to say to France, ''We will only accept
a declaration of neutrality on your part if you surrender

I30 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

to US Briey, Toulon, and Verdun." It is in the light of
these things, gentlemen, that all the conclusions you will
have to draw from the war will take shape.

Your nations entered the war successively, but came one
and all to the help of threatened right. Like Germany,
Great Britain had guaranteed the independence of Belgitim.
Germany sought to crush Belgitim. Great Britain and
France both swore to save her. Thus from the very
beginning of hostilities there came into conflict the two
ideas which for fifty months were to struggle for the domi-
nation of the world — the idea of sovereign force, which
accepts neither control nor check, and the idea of justice,
which depends on the sword only to prevent or repress
the abuse of strength.

Faithfully supported by her dominions and colonies.
Great Britain decided that she could not remain aloof
from a struggle in which the fate of every country was
involved. She has made, and her dominions and colonies
have madie with her, prodigious efforts to prevent the war
from ending in a triumph for the spirit of conquest and
destruction of right.

Japan, in her turn, only decided to take up arms out of
Idyalty to Great Britain, her great ally, and from the con-
sciousness of the danger in which both Asia and Europe
would have stood from the hegemony of which the Germanic
Empires dreamed.

Italy, who from the first had refused to lend a helping
hand to German ambition, rose against an age-long foe
only to answer the call of oppressed populations and to
destroy at the cost of her blood the artificial political com-
bination which took no account of human liberty.

Riunania resolved to fight only to realize that national
imity which was opposed by the same powers of arbitrary

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 131

force. Abandoned, betrayed, and strangled, she had to
submit to an abominable treaty, the revision of which you
will exact.

Greece, whom the enemy for several months tried to
turn from her traditions and destinies, raised an army to
escape attempts at domination of which she felt the growing
threat.

Portugal, China, and Siam abandoned neutrality only
to escape the strangling pressure of the Central Powers.
Thus it was the extent of German ambitions that brought
so many people, great and small, to align against the same
adversary.

And what shall we say of the solemn resolutions taken
by the United States in the spring of 191 7, under the aus-
pices of the illustrious president, Mr. Wilson, whom I am
happy to greet here in the name of grateful France, and if
you will allow me to say so, gentlemen, in the name of all
the nations represented in this room?

What shall I say of the many other American powers
which either declared themselves against Germany — Brazil,
Cuba, Panama, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Haiti, Honduras
— or at least broke off diplomatic relations — Bolivia, Peru,
Ecuador, Uruguay? From north to south the New World
rose with indignation when it saw the Empires of Central
Europe, after having let loose the war without provocation
and without excuse, carry it on with fire, pillage, and mas-
sacre of inoffensive beings.

The intervention of the United States was something
more, something greater, than a great political and military
event. It was a supreme judgment passed at the bar of
history by the lofty conscience of a free people and their
chief magistrate on the enormous responsibilities incurred
in the frightful conduct which was lacerating humanity.
10

132 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

It was not only to protect thenivSelves from the audacious
aims of German megalomania that the United States
equipped fleets and created immense armies, but also and
above all to defend an ideal of liberty over which they
saw the huge shadow of the Imperial eagle encroaching
farther every day. America, the daughter of Europe,
crossed the ocean to wrest her mother from the humiliation
of thraldom and to save civilization.

The American people wished to put an end to the greatest
scandal that has ever sullied the annals of mankind. Auto-
cratic governments, having prepared in the secrecy of the
chancelleries and General Staff a mad program of universal
dominion, at the time fixed by their genius fbr intrigue
let loose their packs and sounded the horns for the chase,
ordering science, at the very time when it was beginning
to abolish distances, to bring men closer and make life
sweeter, to leave the bright sky toward which it was
soaring, and to place itself submissively at the service of vio-
lence; lowering the religious ideas to the extent of mak-
ing God the complacent auxiliary of their passions and the
accomplice of their crimes; in short, counting as naught
the traditions and wills of peoples, the lives of citizens,
the honor of women, and all those principles of public
and private morality which we, for our part, have endeav-
ored to keep unaltered through the war, and which
neither nations nor peoples can repudiate or disregard with
impunity.

While the conflict was gradually extending over the
entire surface of the earth, the clanking of chains was heard
here and there, and captive nationalities, from the depths
of their age-long jails, cried out to us for help. Yet more,
they escaped to come to our aid. Poland came to life
again; sent us troops. The Czecho-Slovaks won their

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 133

rights to independence in Siberia, in France and Italy.
The Jugo-Slavs, the Armenians, the Syrians, and the
Lebanese, the Arabs, all the oppressed peoples, all the
victims long helpless or resigned of great historic deeds
of injustice, all the martyrs of the past, all the outraged
consciences, all the strangled liberties, reviewed the clash
of arms and turned toward us as their natural defenders.

War gradually attained the fullness of its first significance
and became in the fullest sense of the term a crusade of
himianity for right, and if anything can console us, in part
at least, for the losses we have suffered, it is assuredly the
thought that our victory is also the victory of right. This
victory is complete, for the enemy only asked for the armis-
tice to escape from an irretrievable military disaster. In
the interest of justice and peace it now rests with you to
reap from this victory its full fruits.

In order to carry out this immense task you have decided
to admit at first only the allied or associated powers, and in
so far as their interests are involved in the debates the
nations which remained neutral. You have thought that
the terms of peace ought to be settled among ourselves
before they are communicated to those against whom we
have together fought the good fight.

The solidarity which has united us during the war and
has enabled us to win military success ought to remain
unimpaired during the negotiations for and after the signing
of the treaty.

It is not only the governments but free peoples who are
represented here. To the test of danger they have learned
to know and help one another. They want their intimacy
of yesterday to assure the peace of to-morrow. Vainly
would our enemies seek to divide us. If they have not
yet renounced their customary manoeuvers, they will soon

134 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

find that they are meeting to-day, as during the hostilities,
a homogeneous block which nothing will be able to disin-
tegrate. Even before the armistice you reached that
necessary unity under the aid of the lofty and moral and
political truths of which President Wilson has nobly made
himself the interpreter, and in the light of these truths you
intend to accomplish your mission.

You will, therefore, seek nothing but justice, justice that
has no favorites, justice in territorial problems, justice in
financial problems, justice in economic problems. But
justice is not inert, it does not submit to injustice. What
it demands first when it has been violated are restitution
and reparation.

It is not only governments, but justice, that demands
first, when it has been violated, restitution and reparation
for the peoples and individuals who have been despoiled or
maltreated. In formulating this lawful claim it obeys
neither hatred nor an instinctive or thoughtless desire for
reprisals. It pursues a twofold object — to render to each
his due and not to condone the crime through leaving it
unpunished.

What justice also demands, inspired by the same feeling,
is the punishment of the guilty and effective guaranties
against an active return of the spirit by which they were
prompted, and it is logical to demand that these guaranties
should be given, above all, to the nations that have been
and might again be most exposed to aggression or threat,
to those who have many times stood in danger of being
submerged by the periodic tide of the same invasion.

What justice banishes is the dream of conquest and
imperialism, contempt for national will, the arbitrary
exchange of provinces between states, as though people
were but articles of furniture or pawns in a game. The

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 135

time is no more when diplomatists could meet to redraw
with authority the map of the world on the comer of a table.

If you are to remake the map of the world, it is in
the name of the peoples, and one condition is that you
shall faithfully interpret their thoughts and respect the
rights of nations, small and great, to dispose of them-
selves, and to reconcile with this the equally sacred right
of ethnical and religious minorities — a formidable task
which science and history, your two advisers, will con-
tribute to assist and facilitate.

You will naturally strive to secure the material and moral
means of subsistence for all those people who are constituted
or reconstituted into states, for those who wish to unite
themselves to their neighbors, for those who divide them-
selves according to their regained traditions, and, lastly, for
all those whose freedom you have already sanctioned or are
about to sanction. You will not call them into existence
only to sentence them to death immediately, because you
would like your work in this, as in all other matters, to be
fruitful and lasting.

While introducing into the world as much harmony as
possible, you will, in conformity with the fourteenth of the
propositions adopted by the great allied powers, establish
a general League of Nations, which will be the supreme
guaranty against any fresh assault upon the right of peoples.
You do not intend this international association to be
against anybody in the future. It will not, of a set purpose,
shut out anybody, but, having been organized by the
nations that have sacrificed themselves in the defense of
right, it will receive from them its statutes and fundamental
rules.

It will lay down conditions concerning present or future
adherence, and as it is to have for its essential aim the

136 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

prevention, as far as possible, of the renewal of wars, it
will, above all, seek to gain respect for the peace which
you will have established, and will find it the less difficult
to maintain in proportion as this peace will in itself
imply the greater realities of justice and safer guaranties
of stability.

By this new order of things you will meet the aspirations
of humanity, which, after the frightful conclusions of the
blood-stained years, ardently wishes to feel itself protected
by a union of free peoples against every possible revival of
primitive savagery. An immortal glory will attach to the
names of the nations and the men who have desired to
cooperate in this grand work in faith and brotherhood,
and who have taken the pains to eliminate from the future
peace causes of disturbance and instability.

This very day forty-eight years ago — on the eighteenth
of January, 187 1 — the German Empire was proclaimed by
an army of invasion in the chateau at Versailles. It was
consecrated by the fate of two French provinces. It was
thus a violation from its origin, and, by the fault of its
founders, it was born in injustice. It has ended in oblivion.

You are assembled in order to repair the evil that has
been done, and to prevent a recurrence of it. You hold in
your hands the future of the world. I leave you, gentlemen,
to your grave deliberations, and declare the Conference of
Paris open.

NOMINATES M. CLEMENCEAU

President Wilson rose as M. Poincar^ made his exit, and spoke as
follows:

Mr. Chairman: It gives me great pleasure to propose
as permanent chairman of the Conference M. Clemenceau,
the president of the Council.

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 137

I would do this as a matter of custom. I would do this
as a tribute to the French Republic. But I wish to do it
as something more than that. I wish to do it as a tribute
to the man.

France deserves the precedence not only because we are
meeting at her capital and because she has undergone
some of the most tragical suffering of the war, but also
because her capital, her ancient and beautiful capital, has
so often been the center of conferences of this sort, on which
the fortunes of large parts of the world turned.

It is a very delightful thought that the history of the
world, which has so often centered here, will now be crowned
by the achievements of this Conference — because there is
a sense in which this is the supreme conference of the history
of mankind.

More nations are represented here than were ever repre-
sented in such a conference before. The fortunes of all
peoples are involved. A great war is ended, which seemed
about to bring a universal cataclysm. The danger is
past. A victory has been won for mankind, and it is
delightful that we should be able to record these great
results in this place.

But it is more delightful to honor France because we can
so honor her in the person of so distinguished a servant.
We have all felt in our participation in the struggles of this
war the fine steadfastness which characterized the leadership
of the French in the hands of M. Clemenceau. We have
learned to admire him, and those of us who have been
associated with him have acquired a genuine affection for him.

Moreover, those of us who have been in these recent
days in constant consultation with him know how warmly
his purpose is set toward the goal of achievement to which
all our faces are turned. He feels as we feel, as I have no

138 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

doubt everybody in this room feels, that we are trusted to
do a great thing, to do it in the highest spirit of friendship
and accommodation, and to do it as promptly as possible
in order that the hearts of men may have fear lifted from
them and that they may return to those purposes of life
which will bring them happiness and contentment and
prosperity.

Knowing his brotherhood of heart in these great matters,
it affords me a personal pleasure to propose that M. Cle-
menceau shall be the permanent chairman of this Conference.

MR. LLOYD GEORGE SECONDS NOMINATION

Premier Lloyd George seconded the nomination of M. Clemenceau,
speaking earnestly of the distinguished services the French premier
had rendered in war and peace. Mr. Lloyd George said:

I count it not merely a pleasure, but a great privilege,
that I should be expected on behalf of the British Empire
delegates to support the motion of President Wilson. I do
so for the reason which he has so eloquently given expres-
sion to, as a tribute to the man. When I was a school
boy, M. Clemenceau was a compelling and a conscious
figure in the politics of his native land, and his fame had
extended far'beyond the bounds of France.

Were it not for that undoubted fact, Mr. President, I
should have treated as a legend the common report of
your yea^s. I have attended many conferences with M.
Clemenceau, and in them all the most vigorous, the most
enduring, and the most youthful figure there has been that
of M. Clemenceau. He has had the youthfulness, he has
had the hopefulness and the fearlessness of youth. He is
indeed the '* grand young man*' of France, and I am proud
to stand here to propose that he should take the chair in this
great Conference that is to settle the peace of the world.

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 139

I know of none better qualified, or as well qualified, to
occupy this chair than M. Clemenceau. And I speak
from my experience in its claim. He and I have not always
agreed, we have very often agreed. We have sometimes
disagreed, and we have always expressed our disagreements
very emphatically, because we are ourselves.

But, although there will be delays, and inevitable delays,
in the signing of peace, due to the inherent difficulties of
what we have to settle, I will guarantee from my knowledge
of M. Clemenceau that there will be no waste of time. And
that is important.

The world is thirsting and hungering for peace. There
are millions of people who want to get back to the world-
work of peace. And the fact that M. Clemenceau is in
the chair will be proof that they will get there without any
delays which are due to anything except the difficulties
which are essential in what we have to perform. He is
one of the great speakers of the world. But no one knows
better than he that the best speaking is that which impels
beneficent actions.

I have another reason. During the dark days we have
passed through, his courage, his unfailing courage, his
untiring energy, his inspiration, have helped the Allies
through to triumph, and I know of no one to whom that
victory is more attributable than the man who sits in this
chair. In his own person, more than any living man, he
represents the heroism, he represents the genius, of the
indomitable people of his land.

And for these reasons I count it a privilege that I should
be expected to second this motion.

Baron Sonnino, the Italian foreign minister, added Italy's tribute,
whereupon the election of M. Clemenceau as presiding officer was
made unanimous.

I40 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

M. CLEMENCEAU'S REPLY

In a feeling address, M. Clemenceau acknowledged the honor con-
ferred upon him. He turned first to President Wilson and bowed
his thanks; then to Mr. Lloyd George for the tribute he had paid him.
It was not alone a tribute to him, he said, but to France. Premier
Clemence9,u responded as follows:

You would not expect me to keep silence after what the
two eminent statesmen who have just spoken have said.
I cannot help expressing my great, my profound gratitude
to the illustrious President of the United States, to the
Prime Minister of Great Britain, and to Baron Sonnino
for the words I have just heard from their lips.

Long ago, when I was young, as Mr. Lloyd George has
recalled to you, when I was traveling in America and in
England I always heard the French reproached for an
excess of courtesy, which sometimes went beyond the
truth. As I listened to the American statesman and to
the English statesman I wondered whether they had not
caught in Paris our national disease of courtesy. Neverthe-
less, gentlemen, I must say that my election is necessarily
due to the old international tradition of courtesy to the
country which has the honor to receive the Peace Con-
ference in its capital.

I wish also to say that this testimony of friendship, if
they will allow to me the word, on the part of President
Wilson and Mr. Lloyd George in particular, has touched
me deeply, because I see in it a new strength for all three
of us to accomplish, with the co-operation of the entire
Conference, the arduou^ work which is entrusted to us.
I gather from it a new confidence in the success of our
efforts.

President Wilson has special authority to say that this
is the first time in fact that the world has ever seen

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES T41

assembled together a delegation of all the civilized nations
of the earth.

The greater the bloody catastrophe which has devastated
and ruined one of the richest parts of France, the greater
and more splendid must be the reparation — not only the
material reparation, the vulgar reparation, if I dare speak
so, which is due all of us, but the higher and nobler repara-
tion of the new institution which we will try to establish, in
order that nations may at length escape from the fatal
embrace of ruinous wars, which destroy everything, heap
up ruins, terrorize the populace, and prevent them from
going freely about their work for fear of enemies which
may rise up from one day to the next.

It is a great, splendid, and noble ambition which has
come to all of us. It is desirable that success should crown
our efforts. This cannot take place unless we have all
firmly fixed and clearly determined ideas on what we wish
to do.

I said in the Chamber a few days ago, and I wish to
repeat here, that success is not possible unless we remain
firmly united. We have come together as friends; we must
leave this hall as friends.

That, gentlemen, is the first thought that comes to me.
All else must be subordinated to the necessity of a closer
and closer union among the nations who have taken part
in this great war, and to the necessity of remaining friends.
For the League of Nations is here. It is yourself. It is
for you to make it live, and to make it live we must have
it really in our hearts.

As I told President Wilson a few days ago, there is no
sacrifice that I am not willing to make in order to accomplish
this, and I do not doubt that you all have the same senti-
ment. We will make these sacrifices, but on the condition

142 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

that we endeavor impartially to conciliate interests appar-
ently contradictory, on the higher plane of a greater, happier,
and better humanity. '

That, gentlemen, is what I had to say to you. I am
touched beyond words at the evidence of good will and
friendship which you show me.

The program of this Conference has been laid down by
President Wilson. It is no longer the peace of a more or
less vast territory; no longer the peace of continents; it is
the peace of nations that is to be made. This program is
sufficient in itself. There is no superfluous word. Let us
act swiftly and well.

TO THE FRENCH SENATE

On January 20 President Wilson was entertained by the president
and members of the French Senate. M. Dubost, president, welcomed
President Wilson in the following words:

Mr. President: My colleagues and myself thank you for
having been so good as to accept our invitation and to give
us some hours of your time, which we know to be devoted
to the high meditations and the important negotiations
upon which the fate of the peoples depends. From your
first steps on the land of France and since your entry into
Paris the French people have spontaneously given their
hearts to you, and they have perceived at once in your
frank smile and in your so loyal and open physiognomy
that you, too, were spontaneously giving yourself to them.

You are to-day in an old palace of France, and it is among
these grand reminders of past times that with thoughts
rejuvenated by republican ardor, yet with patriotism, the
French Senate shapes a history which already counts fifteen
centuries. We welcome here, Mr. President, you and your
ideas. Nowhere could your splendid ambition to substitute

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 143

for the periodically broken equilibrium of material forces
the definite award of moral forces elicit more enthusiasm
than in France, and nowhere more than in the Senate,
since the statute of international peace has been first of all
and for a long time prepared by some of its most eminent
members.

Our national problem consists, therefore, in combining
our Etu-opean past and our actual material security with
the conditions of the new order for which you have given
so noble a formula, because this new order will ever have
to lean on some force for which France will, when all is
told, stand the most advanced and exposed sentinel. We
firmly believe with you, Mr. President, and allow me to
add, sincere and great friend, that a new world order and,
perhaps, a world harmony are possible, in which our French
country will at last be liberated from the nightmare of
invasion — our country, for which nearly 1,400,000 men of
France have just given their lives.

It is with such a hope that we shall most willingly partici-
pate in the sublime crusade which you have come to under-
take on the devastated soil of old Etirope, where hatred and
discord still howl after the guns have become silent, and
where anarchy causes a vast part of mankind to stagger.
The task is a gigantic one, but it is worthy of your country,
accustomed to great undertakings, and of ours, the ancient
artisan of Western civilization. Mr. President, we salute
your great heart and your high intelligence with a joyful
hope and a fervent acclamation.

President Wilson, addressing M. Dubost and President Poincar^,
said in reply:

Mr, President of the Senate; Mr. President of the Republic :
You have made me feel your welcome in words as generous
as they are delightful, and I feel that you have graciously

144 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

called me your friend. May I not in turn call this company
a company of my friends? For everything that you have
so finely said, sir, has been corroborated in every circum-
stance of our visit to this country. Everywhere we have^
been welcomed not only, but welcomed in the spirit and
with the same thought, until it has seemed as if the spirits
of the two countries came together in an unusual and
beautiful accord.

We know the long period of peril through which France
has gone. France thought us remote in comprehension and
sympathy, and I dare say there were times when we did
not comprehend, as you comprehended, the danger in the
presence of which the world stood. There was no time
when we did not know how near it was, and I fully under-
stand, sir, that throughout these trying years, when man-
kind has waited for the catastrophe, the anxiety of France
must have been the deepest and most constant of all, for
she did stand at the frontier of freedom. She had carved
out her own fortunes through a long period of eager struggle.
She had done great things in building up a great, new
France. And just across the border, separated from her
only by a few fortifications and a little country whose
neutrality, it has turned out, the enemy did not respect,
lay the shadow cast by the cloud which enveloped Germany,
the cloud of intrigue, the cloud of dark purpose, the cloud
of sinister design. This shadow lay at the very borders of
France.

And yet, it is fine to remember here that for France this
was not only a peril, but a challenge. France did not
tremble. France quietly and in her own way prepared her
sons for the struggle that was coming. She never took the
initiative or did a single thing that was aggressive. She
had prepared herself for defense, not in order to impose

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 145

her will upon other people. She had prepared herself that
no other people might impose its will upon her.

As I stand with you, and as I mix with the delightful
people of this country, I see this in their thoughts:
''America always was our friend. Now she understands.
Now she comprehends, and now she has come to bring us
this message: that, understanding, she will always be ready
to help." And while, as you say, sir, this danger may
prove to be a continuing danger, while it is true that France
will always be nearest this threat if we cannot turn it from
a threat into a promise, there are many elements that ought
to reassure France.

There is a new, awakened world. It is not ahead of us,
but around us. It knows that its dearest interests are
involved in its standing together for a common purpose.
It knows that the peril of France, if it continues, will be
the peril of the world. It knows that not only France must
organize against this peril, but that the world must organize
against it.

So I see in these welcomes not only hospitality, not only
kindness, not only hope, but a purpose, a definite, clearly
defined purpose, that men, understanding one another,
must now support one another and that all the sons
of freedom are under a common oath to see that free-
dom never suffers this danger again. That, to my mind,
is the impressive element of this welcome. I know how
much of it, sir, and I know how little of it, to appropriate
to myself.

I know that I have the very distinguished honor to
represent a nation whose heart is in this business, and I
am proud to speak for the people whom I represent. But
I know that you honor me in a representative capacity.
I delight in this welcome, therefore, as if I had brought

146 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

the people of the United States with me and they could see
in your faces what I see in the tokens of welcome and
affection.

The sum of the whole matter is that France has earned
and has won the brotherhood of the world. She has stood
at the chief post of danger, and the thoughts of mankind
and her brothers everywhere, her brothers in freedom, turn
to her and center upon her. If this be true, as I believe it to
be, France is fortunate to have suffered. She is fortunate
to have proved her mettle as one of the champions of liberty,
and she has tied to herself, once and for all, all those who
love freedom and truly believe in the progress and rights
of man.

THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS .

President Wilson's address before the Peace Conference on January
25, was as follows:

Mr. Chairman: I consider it a distinguished privilege to
be permitted to open the discussion in this Conference on
the League of Nations. We have assembled for two pur-
poses: to make the present settlements which have been
rendered necessary by this war and also to secure the peace
of the world, not only by the present settlements, but by
the arrangements we shall make at this Conference for its
maintenance.

The League of Nations seems to me to be necessary for
both of these purposes. There are many complicated
questions connected with the present settlements, which
perhaps cannot be successfully worked out to an ultimate
issue by the decisions we shall arrive at here. I can easily
conceive that many of these settlements will need subsequent
consideration; that many of the decisions we make shall
need subsequent alteration in some degree, for, if I may

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONvSES 147

judge by my own study of some of these questions, they
are not susceptible of confident judgments at present.

It is therefore necessary that we should set up some
machinery by which the work of this Conference should
be rendered complete.

We have assembled here for the purpose of doing very
much more than making the present settlements that are
necessary. W^ ^are assembled under very peculiar cgxt
ditions of world opinion.// Ijnay say, without straining
the point, that we are not the representatives of goverur
rnents^^but representatives of the peoples, v

It will not suffice to satisfy governmental circles any-
where. It is necessary that we should satisfy the opinion
of mankind.

The burden^ ofjthis ;s^ar have fallen in an unusuaj degree
upon the whole population of the countries involved. I do
not need to draw for you the picture of how the burden
has been thrown back from the front upon the older men,
tiponjthe women, upon the children, upon the homes of the
civilized world, and-how the real strain of the war has
come where the eyei of ^Jie government^ could not reach,
but where the heart of humanity beats.

We are bidden by these people to make a peace which
will make them secure. We are bidden by these people to
see to it that this strain does not come upon them again.
And I venture to say that it has been possible for them to
bear this strain because they hoped that those who rep-
resented them could get together after this war and make
such another sacrifice unnecessary.

It is a solemn obligation on our part, therefore, to make
permanent arrangements that justice shall be rendered and
peace maintained.

This is the central object of our meeting. Settlements

148 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

may be temporary, but the action of the nations in the
interest of peace and justice must be permanent. We can
set up permanent processes. We may not be able to set
up a permanent decision.

Therefore it seems to me that we must take as far as we
can a picture of the world into our minds. Is it not a star-
tling circumstance, for one thing, that the great discoveries
of science, that the quiet studies of men in laboratories,
that the thoughtful developments which have taken place
in quiet lecture rooms, have now been turned to the
destruction of civilization? The powers of destruction have
not so much multiplied as they have gained facilities.

The enemy, whom we have just overcome, had at his
seats of learning some of the principal centers of scientific
study and discovery, and he used them in order to make
destruction sudden and complete. And only the watchful.
€^^ continuous cooperation of men can see to it that science,
as well as armed men, is kept within the harness of civili-
zation.

In a sense the United States is less interested in this
subject than the other nations here assembled. With her
great territory and her extensive sea borders, it is less
likely that the United States should suffer from the attack
of enemies than that other nations should suffer. And the
ardor of the United States — for it is a very deep and genu-
ine ardor — for the society of nations is not an ardor spring-
ing out of fear or apprehension, but an ardor springing
out of the ideals which have come in the consciousness of
this war.

In coming into this war the United States never for a
moment thought that she was intervening in the politics
of Europe, or the politics of Asia, or the politics of any
part of the world. Her thought was that all the world had

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 149

now become conscious that there was a single cause of
justice and of Hberty for men of every kind and place.

Therefore the United States should feel that its part in
this war should be played in vain if there ensued upon it
abortive European settlements. It would feel that it
could not take part in guaranteeing those European settle-
ments unless that guaranty involved the continuous super-
intendence of the peace of the world by the associated
nations of the .world.

Therefore it seems to me that we must contribute our best
judginent in order to make this League of Nations a vital
thing — a thing sometimes called into life to meet an exi-
gency, but always functioning in watchful attendance upon
the interests of the nations — and that its continuity should
be a vital continuity; that its functions are continuing
functions that do not permit an intermission of its watch-
fulness and of its labor; that it should be the eye of the
nations, to keep watch upon the common interest — an eye
that did not slumber, an eye that was everywhere watchful
and attentive.

And if we do not make it vital, what shall we do? We
shall disappoint the expectations of the peoples. This is
what their thought centers upon.

I have had the very delightful experience of visiting
several nations since I came to this side of the water, and
every time the voice of the body of the people reached me,
through any representative, at the front of the plea stood
the hope of the League of Nations.

Gentlemen, the select classes of mankind are no longer
the governors of mankind. The fortunes of mankind are
now in the hands of the plain^ people of the whole world.
Satisfy them, and you^ave justified ^heir confidence not
01113^7 but have established peace. Fail to satisfy them, and

150 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

no arrangement that you can make will either set up or
steady the peace 6f the world.

You can imagine, ,^I dare say, the sentiments and the
purpo^e~wrth which the representatives of the United
States support this great project for a League of Nations.
We regard it as the keynote of the whole, which expressed
our purposes and ideals in this war, and which the associated
nations have accepted as the basis of a settlement.

If we return to the United States without having made
every effort in our power to realize this program, we should
return to meet the merited scorn of our fellow citizens.
For they are a body that constitutes a great democracy.
They expect their leaders to speak; their representatives to
be their servants.

We have no choice but to obey their mandate. But it
is with the greatest enthusiasm and pleasure that we accept
that mandate. And because this is the keynote of the'
whole fabric, we have pledged our every purpose to it, as
we have to every item of the fabric. Wewould not dare
abate a single item of the program which constitutes our
instruction! ; we would not dare to compromise upon any
matter J|J[^ the champion of this thing — this peace of the
world, this attitude of justice, this principle that we are
the masters of no peoplel, but are here to see that every
people in the world shall choose its own masters and govern
its own destinies, not as we wish, but as th^ wishb • .

We are here to see, in short, that the very foundations
of this war are swept away. Those foundations were the
private choice of a small coteriesof civil rulers and military
staffs. Those foundations were the aggression of great
powers upon the small. Those foundations were the
holding together of empires of unwilling subjects by the
duress of arms. Those foundations were the power'- of

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 151

small bodies of men to wi^ their will and use mankind
as^pawnsJiLa ganie. And nothing less than the emanci|)a-
tion of 'the world from these things will accomplish peace.

You can see that the representatives of the United States
are, therefore, never put to the embarrassment of choosing
a way of expediency, because they have had laid down
before them the unalterable lines of principles. And, thank
God, these lines have been accepted as the lines of settle-
ments by all the high-minded men who have had to do
with the beginning of this great business.

I hope, Mr. Chairman, when it is known, as I feel con-
fident it will be known, that we have adopted the principle
of the League of Nations and mean to work out that principle
in effective action, we shall by that single thing have lifted
a great part of the load of anxiety from the hearts of men
everywhere. ^ A~6^'

We stand in a peculiar eattse. As I go about the streets
here I see everywhere the American uniform. Those men
came into the war after we had uttered our purposed They
came as crusaders, not merely to win a war, but to win a
cause. And I am responsible to them, for it falls to me
to formulate the purpose <»f or which I asked them to fight,
and I, like them, must be a crusader for these things, what-
ever it costs and whatever it may be necessary to do in
honor to accomplish the object for which they fought.

I have been glad to find from day to day that there is
no question of our standing alone in this matter, for there
are champions of this cause upon every hand. I am
merely avowing this in " order that you may understand
why, perhaps, it fell to us, who are disengaged from the
politics of this great continent and of the Orient, to suggest
that this was the keystone of the arch, and why it occurred
to the generous mind of your President to call upon me to

152 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONwS

open thivS debate. It is not because we alone represent
this idea, but because it is our privilege to associate our-
selves with you in representing it.

I have only tried in what I have said to give you the
fountains of the enthusiasm which is within us for this
thing, for those fountains spring, it seems to me, from all
the ancient wrongs and sympathies of mankind, and the
very pulse of the world seems to beat to the feilte|t in this
enterprise.

TO THE CHAMBER OF DEPUTIES

In the presence of President Poincare, Premier Clemenceau, M.
Dubost, president of the Senate, M. Paul Deschanel, president of the
Chamber of Deputies, all the members of both Houses, and a brilliant
company that packed the Chamber literally to the roof, President
W^on, on February 3, made an important and significant speech to
the French legislature in joint session, in which he assured his auditors
of the practical realization of the prime object which took him to
Europe — the establishment of the League of Nations — and returned
"the loving kiss of France" with a pledge of future security, not only
for France, but for the world.

M. Paul Deschanel welcomed President Wilson in the following
eloquent speech:

The representatives of France are happy in offering you
a respectful and affectionate welcome. Your visit evokes
in our souls the memory of another memorable sojourn
here — that of Benjamin Franklin on the eve of the French
Revolution.

What France acclaims in you is not only that you are
the chief of a free democracy, a descendant of those admir-
able founders of the American Republic who brought across
the ocean all the flower and fruit of experience in Anglo-
Saxon politics, successor of Washington and Lincoln, but
that you are a great citizen, who on that day when duty

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 153

appeared to him followed the will of his nation and threw
the entire force of the New World into the service of right.
It is the high conscience, which, imbued with the purest
maxims of morality, is trying to make them penetrate into
the governments of men and into the relations of peoples
between themselves.

You wish that out of so much sorrow should come more
justice. As this war was unlike any preceding war, so must
this peace be unlike any preceding peace. Guaranties
must be taken against the recurrence of the horrible things
which have been an opprobrium to the world and which no
one has stigmatized with more force than you; territorial,
military, economic, and financial guaranties to protect the
victims of German ambition against perpetual alarms,
guaranties for free peoples, with efficacious sanctions to
punish the crimes against the peace of the world first ; then
to prevent them.

In your eyes, as in ours, doubtless, the primordial con-
dition of the foundation itself of this New World organiza-
tion is a France definitely made proof against provocations
and attacks. We, who during forty-four years have made
the greatest sacrifices in order to maintain peace, know
from the experience of centuries that the universe will
never breathe freely so long as Germans can accumulate
at our very doors the means* of aggression.

We will forget nothing, neither the bravery of your splen-
did youths, who shed their blood with ours, as one hundred
and forty years ago, nor the victory of General Pershing at
St. Mihiel, nor the inexhaustible and exquisite charity of
your women, nor your noble figure. We find blended
together all the principles of that great American civiliza-
tion, made up of practical and enterprising genius, of
wisdom, and idealism.

154 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

Nothing will separate us. France loves your glorious
country as a sister.

Mr. President of the United States, we, with the Presi-
dent of France, request you to bring to America the loving
kiss of France.

President Wilson replied in the following words, spoken with marked
gravity and emotion:

I am keenly aware of the unusual and distinguished honor
you are paying me by permitting me to meet you in this
place and address you from this historic platform.

Indeed, sir, as da}^ has followed day and week has followed
week in this hospitable land of France, I have felt the
sense of comradeship ever become more and more intimate,
and it has seemed to me that the making of history was
becoming singularly clear.

We knew before the war began that France and America
were united in affection. We knew the occasions which
drew the two nations together in those years, which now
seem so far away, when the world was first beginning to
thrill with the impulse of human liberty, when the soldiers
of France came to help the struggling little Republic of
America to get on its feet and proclaim one of the first
victories of freedom.

We had never forgotten that, but we did not see the full
meaning of it. A hundred years and more went by, and
the spindles were slowly weaving the web of history. We
did not see it to be complete, the whole of the design to
be made plain.

Now look at what has happened. In that far-off day
when France came to the assistance of America, America
was fighting Great Britain. And now she is linked as
closely to Great Britain as she is to France. We see now
how these apparently diverging lines of history are coming

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 155

together. The nations which once stood in battle array
against one another are now, shoulder to shoulder, fighting
a common enemy.

It was a long time before we saw that, and in the last
four years something has happened that is unprecedented in
the history of mankind. It is nothing less than this — that
bodies of men on both sides of the sea and in all parts of the .
world have come to realize their comradeship in freedom.

France, in the meantime, as we have so often said, stood
at the frontier of freedom. Her lines lay along the very
lines that divided the home of freedom from the home of
military despotism. Hers was the immediate peril. Hers
was the constant dread. Hers was the most pressing
necessity of preparation, and she had constantly to ask
herself this question, *'If the blow falls, who will come to
our assistance?"

And the question was answered in the most unexpected
way. Her allies came to her assistance, but many more
than her allies. The free people of the world came to her
assistance.

And in this way America paid her debt of gratitude to
France by sending her sons to fight upon the soil of France.
She did more. She assisted in drawing the forces of the
world together in order that France might never again feel
her isolation; in order that France might never feel that
hers was a lonely peril and would never again have to ask
the question who would come to her assistance.

For the alternative is a terrible alternative for France.
I do not need to point out to you that east of you in Europe
the future is full of question. Beyond the Rhine, across
Germany, across Poland, across Russia, across Asia, there
are questions unanswered, and they may be for the present
unanswerable.

156 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

France still stands at the frontier. France still stands
in the presence of those threatening and unanswered ques-
tions— threatening because unanswered; stands waiting for
the solution of matters which touch her directly and inti-
mately and constantly. And if she must stand alone, what
must she do? She must put upon her people a constant
burden of taxation. She must undergo sacrifice that may
become intolerable.

And not only she but the other nations of the world must
do the like. They must be ready for any terrible incident
of injustice. The thing is not inconceivable. •

I visited the other day a portion of the devastated region
of France. I saw the noble city of Rheims in ruins, and I
could not help saying to myself: ''Here is where the blow
fell because the rulers of the world did not sooner see how
to prevent it."

The rulers of the world have been thinking of the relations
of governments and forgetting the relations of peoples.
They have been thinking of the manoeuvres of international
dealings, when what they ought to have been thinking of
was the fortunes of men and women and the safety of home
and the care that they should take that their people should
be happy because they were safe.

They know that the only way to do this is to make it
certain that the same thing will not always happen that
has happened this time, that there never shall be any doubt
or waiting or surmise, but that whenever France or any free
people is threatened the whole world will be ready to vin-
dicate its liberty.

It is for that reason, I take it, that I find such a warm
and intelligent enthusiasm in France for the society of
nations — France with her keen vision, France with her
prophetic vision.

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 157

It seems to be not only the need of France, but the need
of mankind, and France sees that the sacrifices which are
necessary for the estabhshment of the society of nations
are not to be compared with the constant dread of another
catastrophe faUing on the fair cities and areas of France.

There was a no more beautiful country. There was a
no more prosperous country. There was a no more free-
spirited people. All the world had admired France, and
none of the world grudged France her greatness and her
prosperity except those who grudged her liberty and pros-
perity. And it has profited us, terrible as the cost has been,
to witness what has happened, to see with the physical eye
what has happened, because injustice was wrought.

The President of the Chamber has pictured, as I cannot
picture, the appalling suffering, the terrible tragedy, of
France, but it is a tragedy which could not be repeated.
As the pattern of history has disclosed itself it has disclosed
the hearts of men drawing toward one another. Comrade-
ships have become vivid. The purpose of association has
become evident.

The nations of the world are about to consummate a
brotherhood which will make it unnecessary in the future
to maintain those crushing armaments which make the
peoples suffer almost as much in peace as they suffer in war.

When the soldiers of America crossed the ocean, they did
not bring with them merely their arms. They brought with
them a very vivid conception of France. They landed upon
the soil of France with quickened pulses. They knew that
they had come to do a thing which the heart of America
had long wished to do. When General Pershing stood at
the tomb of Lafayette and said, "Lafayette, we are here!"
it was as if he had said, "Lafayette, here is the completion
of the great story whose first chapter you assisted to write."

158 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONwS

The world has seen the great plot worked out, and now
the people of France may rest fissured that their prosperity
is secure because their homes are secure; and men every-
where not only wish her safety and prosperity, but are ready
to assure her that with all the force and wealth at their
command they will guarantee her security and safety.

So, as we sit from day to day at the Quai d'Orsay I think
to myself that we might, if we could gain an audience of
the free peoples of the world, adopt the language of General
Pershing and say, ' 'Friends, men, humble women, little chil-
dren, we are here. We are here as your friends, as your cham-
pions, as your representatives. We have come to work out
for you a world which is fit to live in and in which all coun-
tries can enjoy the heritage of liberty for which France and
America and England and Italy have paid so dear."

A RETURN VISIT PROMISED

• In reply to a delegation of the French Association of the Society of
Nations, which called upon him on February 13, President Wilson
made known formally for the first time his intention to return to
France after going to Washington for the closing session of Congress.

I appreciate very deeply what has been said, and I take
it that the kind suggestion is that some time after my
return we should arrange a public meeting, at which, I
am quite confident, we may celebrate the completion of
the work, at any rate up to a certain very far advanced
stage, the consummation of which we have been working
and hoping for for a long time.

It would be a very happy thing if that could be arranged.
I can only say for myself that I sincerely hope it can be.
I should wish to lend any assistance possible to so happy
a consummation.

I cannot help thinking of how many miracles this war
has already wrought — miracles of comprehension as to our

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 159

interdependence as nations and as human beings, miracles
as to the removal of obstacles which seemed big, and now
have grown small, in the way of active and organized
cooperation of nations in regard to the establishment and
maintenance of justice.

And the thoughts of the people having been drawn
together, there has already been created a force which is
not only very great but very formidable — a force which
can be rapidly mobilized, a force which is very effective
when mobilized, namely, the moral force of the world.

One advantage in seeing one another and talking with
one another is to find that, after all, we all think the same
way. We may try to put the result of the thing into differ-
ent forms, but we start with the same principles.

I have often been thought of as a man more interested
in principles than in practice, whereas, as a matter of fact,
I can say that, in one sense, principles have never interested
me, because principles prove themselves when stated. They
do not need any debate. The thing that is difficult and
interesting is how to put them into practice. Large dis-
course is not possible on the principles, but large discourse
is necessary on the matter of realizing them.

So that, after all, principles, until translated into practice,
are very thin and abstract and, I may add, uninteresting
things. It is not interesting to have far-away vision, but it
is interesting to have near-by visions of what it is possible to
accomplish. And in a meeting such as you are projecting
perhaps we can record the success that we shall have then
achieved of putting a great principle into practice, and demon-
strated that it can be put into practice, though only, let us
say, five years ago it was considered an impractical dream.

I will cooperate with great happiness in the plan that
you may form after my return, and I thank you very warmly
for the compliment of this personal visit.

i6o AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

THE COVENANT OF THE LEAGUE
OF NATIONS

Tennyson's dream of eighty years ago, of the time when

. . . .the war-drums throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world,

came appreciably nearer to realization at the meeting of the Peace
Congress on Friday, February 14 — St. Valentine's Day — when
President Wilson read a draft of the Constitution of the proposed
League of Nations. The President prefaced the reading of the
historic document by the following address:

Mr. Chairman: I have the honor, and assume it a very
great privilege, of reporting in the name of the Commission
constituted by this Conference on the formulation of a
plan for the League of Nations. I am happy to say that
it is a unanimous report, a unanimous report from the
representatives of fourteen nations — the United States,
Great Britain, France, Italy, Japan, Belgium, Brazil, China,
Czecho-Slovakia, Greece, Poland, Portugal, Rumania, and
Serbia.

I think it will be serviceable and interesting if I, with
your permission, read the document as the only report
we have to make.

President Wilson then read the draft. When he reached Article
XV and had read through the second paragraph the President paused
and said:

I pause to point out that a misconception might arise
in connection with one of the sentences I have just read —
**if any party shall refuse to comply, the Council shall
propose measures necessary to give effect to the recommen-
dations."

A case in point, a purely hypothetical case, is this: Sup-
pose there is in. the possession of a particular power a piece

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES i6i

of territory, or some other substantial thing, in dispute, to
which it is claimed that it is not entitled. Suppose that
the matter is submitted to the Executive Council for recom-
Tnendation as to the settlement of the dispute, diplomacy
having failed, and suppose that the decision is in favor of
the party which claims the subject matter of dispute, as
against the party which h^^s the subject matter in dispute.

Then, if the party in possession of the subject matter in
dispute merely sits still and does nothing, it has accepted
the decision of the Council, in the sense that it makes no
resistance, but something must be done to see that it sur-
renders the subject matter in dispute.

In such a case, the only case contemplated, it is provided
that the Executive Council may then consider what steps
will be necessary to oblige the party against whom judg-
ment has been given to comply with the decisions of the
Council.

After having read Article XIX, President Wilson again stopped and
said:

Let me say that before being embodied in this document
this was the subject matter of a very careful discussion by
representatives of the five greater parties, and that their
unanimous conclusion is the matter embodied in this article.

After having read the entire document, President Wilson continued
as follows:

It gives me pleasure to add to this formal reading of the
result of our labors that the character of the discussion
which occurred at the sittings of the Commission was not
only of the most constructive but of the most encouraging
sort. It was obvious throughout our discussions that,
although there were subjects upon which there were indi-
vidual differences of judgment with regard to the method

1 62 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OP NATIONS

by which our objects should be obtained, there was practi-
cally at no point any serious difference of opinion or motive
as to the objects which we were seeking.

Indeed, while these debates were not made the oppor-
tunity for the expression of enthusiasm and sentiments, I
think the other members of the Commission will agree with
me that there was an undertone of high respect and of
enthusiasm for the thing we were trying to do, which was
heartening throughout every meeting.

Because we . felt that in a way this Conference did in-
trust to us the expression of one of its highest and most
important purposes, to see to it that the concord of the
world in the future with regard to the objects of justice
should not be subject to doubt or uncertainty, that the
cooperation of the great body of nations should be assured
in the maintenance of peace upon terms of honor and of
international obligations, the compulsion of that task was
constantly upon us, and at no point was there shown the
slightest desire to do anything but suggest the best means
to accomplish that great object. There is very great signifi-
cance, therefore, in the fact that the result was reached
unanimously.

Fourteen nations were represented, among them all of
those powers which for convenience we have . called the
great powers, and among the rest a representation of the
greatest variety of circumstances and interests. So that
I think we are justified in saying that the significance of
the result, therefore, has the deepest of all meanings, the
union of wills in a common purpose, a union of wills which
cannot be resisted, and which, I dare say, no nation will
run the risk of attempting to resist.

Now as to the character of the document. While it has
consumed some time to read this document, I think you

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 163

will see at once that it is very simple, and in nothing so
simple as in the structure which it suggests for a League of
Nations — a body of delegates, an executive council, and a
permanent secretariat.

When it came to the question of determining the character
of the representation in the body of delegates, we are aware
of a feeling which is current throughout the world.

Inasmuch as I am stating it in the presence of the official
representatives of the various governments here present,
including myself, I may say that there is a universal feeling
that the world cannot rest satisfied with merely official
guidance. There has reached us through many channels
the feeling that if the deliberating body of the League of
Nations was merely to be a body of officials representing
the various governments, the people of the world would
not be sure that some of the mistakes, which preoccupied
officials had admittedly made, might not be repeated.

It was impossible to conceive a method or an assembly
so large and various as to be really representative of the
great body of the peoples of the world, because, as I roughly
reckon it, we represent as we sit around this table more
than twelve hundred million people.

You cannot have a representative assembly of twelve
hundred million people, but if you leave it to each gov-
ernment to have, if it pleases, one or two or three repre-
sentatives, though only with a single vote, it may vary its
representation from time to time not only, but it may
[originate] the choice of its several representatives. [Wireless
here unintelligible.]

Therefore, we thought that this was a proper and a very
prudent concession to the practically universal opinion of
plain men everywhere that they wanted the door left open
to a variety of representation, instead of being confined

i64 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

to a single official body with which they could or might
not find themselves in sympathy.

And you will' notice that this body has unlimited rights
of discussion — I mean of discussion of anything that falls
within the field of international relations — and that it is
especially agreed that war or international misunderstand-
ings or anything that may lead to friction or trouble is
everybody's business, because it may affect the peace of
the world.

And, in order to safeguard the popular power so far as
we could of this representative body, it is provided, you
will notice, that when a subject is submitted, it is not to
arbitration, but to discussion by the Executive Council;
it can, upon the initiative of either of the parties to the
dispute, be drawn out of the Executive Council on the
larger form of the general body of delegates, because through
this instrument we are depending primarily and chiefly
upon one great force, and this is the moral force of the
public opinion of the world — the pleasing and clarifying
and compelling influences of publicity, so that intrigues can
no longer have their coverts, so that designs that are sinister
can at any time be drawn into the open, so that those things
that are destroyed by the light may be promptly destroyed
by the overwhelming light of the universal expression of the
condemnation of the world.

Armed force is in the background in this program, but
it is in the backgroimd, and if the moral force of the world
will not suffice, the physical force of the world shall. But
that is the last resort, because this is intended as a con-
stitution of peace, not as a league for war.

The simplicity of the document seems to me to be one
of its chief virtues, because, speaking for myself, I was
unable to see the variety of circtmistances with which this

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES AND RESPONSES 165

league would have to deal. I was unable, therefore, to
plan all the machinery that might be necessary to meet
the differing and unexpected contingencies. Therefore, I
should say of this document that it is not a strait-jacket,
but a vehicle of life.

A living thing is born, and we must see to it what clothes
we put on it. It is not a vehicle of power, but a vehicle
in which power may be varied at the discretion of those who
exercise it and in accordance with the changing circum-
stances of the time. And yet, while it is elastic, while it is
general in its terms, it is definite in the one thing that we
were called upon to make definite. It is a definite guaranty
of peace. It is a definite guaranty by word against aggres-
sion. It is a definite guaranty against the things which
have just come near bringing the whole structure of civi-
lization into ruin.

Its purposes do not for a moment lie vague. Its purposes
are declared, and its powers are unmistakable. It is not in
contemplation that this should be merely a league to secure
the peace of the world. It is a league which can be used
for cooperation in any international matter.

That is the significance of the provision introduced con-
cerning labor. There are many ameliorations of labor
conditions which can be effected by conference and discus-
sion. I anticipate that there will be a very great usefulness in
the Bureau of Labor which it is contemplated shall be set
up by the League. Men and women and children who work
have been in the background through long ages, and some-
times seemed to be forgotten, while governments have had
their watchful and suspicious eyes upon the manoeuvers of
one another, while the thought of statesmen has been about
structural action and the larger transactions of commerce
and of finance.

i66 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS
»

Now, if I may believe the picture which I see, there comes
into the foreground the great body of the laboring people
of the world, the men and women and children upon whom
the great burden of sustaining the world must from day
to day fall, whether we wish it to do so or not — people who
go to bed tired and wake up without the stimulation of lively
hope. These people will be drawn into the field of inter-
national consultation and help, and will be among the
wards of the combined governments of the world. This
is, I take leave to say, a very great step in advance in the
mere conception of that.

Then, as you will notice, there is an imperative article
concerning the publicity of all international agreements.
Henceforth no member of the League can claim any agree-
ment valid which it has not registered with the Secretary-
General, in whose office, of course, it will be subject to the
examination of anybody representing a member of the
League. And the duty is laid upon the Secretary-General
to publish every doctmient of that sort at the earliest possible
time.

I suppose most persons who have not been conversant
with the business of foreign affairs do not realize how many
hundreds of these agreements are made in a single year,
and how difficult it might be to publish the more unim-
portant of them immediately. How uninteresting it would
be to most of the world to publish them immediately, but
even they must be published just as soon as it is possible
for the Secretary-General to publish them.

Then there is a feature about this covenant which, to my
mind, is one of the greatest and most satisfactory advances
that have been made. We are done with annexations of
helpless peoples, meant in some instances by some powers
to be used merely for exploitation.

• ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 167

We recognize in the most solemn manner that the helpless
and undeveloped peoples of the world, being in that con-
dition, put an obligation upon us to look after their interests
primarily before we use them for our interests, and that in
all cases of this sort hereafter it shall be the duty of the
League to see that the nations who are assigned as the
tutors and advisers and directors of these peoples shall
look to their interests and their development before they
look to the interests and desires of the mandatory nation
itself.

There has been no greater advance than this, gentlemen.
If you look back upon the history of the world, you will see
how helpless peoples have too often been a prey to powers
that had no conscience in the matter. It has been one of
the many distressing revelations of recent years that the
great power which has just been, happily, defeated put
intolerable burdens and injustices upon the helpless people
of some of the colonies which it annexed to itself, that its
interest was rather their extermination than their develop-
ment, that the desire was to possess their land for European
purposes, and not to enjoy their confidence in order that
mankind might be lifted in these places to the next higher
level.

Now, the world, expressing its conscience in law, says
there is an end of that, that our consciences shall be settled
to this thing. States will be picked out which have already
shown that they can exercise a conscience in this matter,
and under their tutelage the helpless peoples of the world
will come into a new light and into a new hope.

So I think I can say of this document that it is at one
and the same time a practical document and a human
document. There is a pulse of sympathy in it. There is
a compulsion of conscience throughout it. It is practical,

i68 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

and yet it is intended to purify, to rectify, to elevate, and I
want to say that, so far as my observation instructs me,
this is in one sense a belated document. I believe that
the conscience of the world has long been prepared to
express itself in some such way. We are not just now
discovering our sympathy for these people and our interest
in them. We are simply expressing it, for it has long been
felt, and in the administration of the affairs of more than
one of the great states represented here — so far as I know,
all of the great states that are represented here — that
humane impulse has already expressed itself in their dealings
with their colonies, whose peoples were yet at a low stage
of civilization.

We have had many instances of colonies lifted into the
sphere of complete self-government. This is not the dis-
covery of a principle. It is the universal application of a
principle. It is the agreement of the great nations which
have tried to live by these standards in their separate
administrations to unite in seeing that their common force
and their common thought and intelligence are lent to
this great and humane enterprise.

I think it is an admission, therefore, for the most
profoimd satisfaction that this hiunane decision should
have been reached in a matter for which the world has long
been waiting and until a very recent period thought that it
was still too early to hope.

Many terrible things have come out of this war, gentle-
men, but some very beautiful things have come out of it.
Wrong has been defeated, but the rest of the world has
been more conscious than it ever was before of the majority
of right. People that were suspicious of one another can
now live as friends and comrades in a single family, and
desire to do so. The miasma of distrust, of intrigue, is

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 169

cleared away. Men are looking eye to eye and saying:
"We are brothers and have a common purpose. We did
not realize it before, but now we do realize it, and this is
our covenant of friendship."

[The complete text of the Constitution of the League of Nations
will be found in the Appendix.]

AU REVOIR

In a farewell message to the French people before leaving Brest on
February 15, President Wilson said:

I cannot leave France without expressing my profound
sense of the great hospitality of the Frence people and the
French government. They have received and treated me
as I most desired to be treated, as a friend, a friend alike
in spirit and in purpose. I am happy to say that I am to
return to assist with all my heart in completing the just
settlements which the Peace Conference is seeking, and I
shall carry with me during my absence very happy memo-
ries of the two months I have spent here.

I have been privileged to see here at first hand what my
sympathies have already conceived — the sufferings and
problems of France — and every day has deepened my
interest in the solution of the grave questions upon whose
proper solution the future prosperity of France and her
associates and the whole world depends. May I not leave
my warm and affectionate farewell greetings .

I70 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

HOME AGAIN
AT BOSTON

On February 25, President Wilson arrived at Boston on the
* 'George Washington" and was met by Governor Coolidge, Mayor
Peters, and a group of distinguished citizens.

In the afternoon the President went to Mechanics' Hall, which
was densely packed, and, after receiving an official welcome from the
governor and the mayor, spoke as follows:

Governor Coolidge, Mr, Mayor, Fellow Citi-^ens: I wonder
if you are half as glad to see me as I am to see you. It
warms my heart to see a great body of my fellow citizens
again, because in some respects during the recent months
I have been very lonely indeed without your comradeship
and counsel, and I tried at every step of the work which fell
to me to recall what I was sure would be your counsel with
regard to the great matters which were under consideration.

I do not want you to think that I have not been appreci-
ative of the extraordinarily generous reception which was
given to me on the other side in saying that it makes me
very happy to get home again. I do not mean to say that
I was not very deeply touched by the cries that came from
the great crowds on the other side, but I want to say to
you in all honesty that I felt them to be a call of greeting
to you rather than to me.

I did not feel that the greeting was personal. I had in
my heart the overcrowning pride of being your representa-
tive, and of receiving the plaudits of men everywhere who
felt that your hearts beat with theirs in the cause of liberty.
There was no mistaking the tone in the voices of those great
crowds. It was not a tone of mere greeting, it was not a

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 171

tone of mere generous welcome ; it was the calling of comrade
to comrade; the cries that come from men who say, **We
have waited for this day when the friends of liberty should
come across the sea and shake hands with us, to see that
a new world was constructed upon a new basis and founda-
tion of justice and right."

I can't tell you the inspiration that came from the senti-
ments that come out of those simple voices of the crowd,
and the proudest thing I have to report to you is that this
great country of ours is trusted throughout the world.

I have not come to report the proceedings or the results
of the proceedings of the Peace Conference. That would
be premature. I can say that I have received very happy
impressions from this Conference, the impression that while
there are many differences of judgment, while there are
some divergencies of object, there is, nevertheless, a common
spirit and a common realization of the necessity of setting
up new standards of right in the world, because the men
who are in conference in Paris realize, as keenly as any
American can realize, that they are not the masters of
their people; that they are the servants of their people and
that the spirit of their people has awakened to a new pur-
pose, and a new conception of their power to realize that
purpose, and that no man dare go home from that Con-
ference and report anything less noble than was expected
of it.

The Conference seems to you to go slowly. From day
to day in Paris it seems to go slowly ; but I wonder if you
realize the complexity of the task which it has undertaken.
It seems as if the settlements of this war affect, and affect
directly, every great, and I sometimes think every small,
nation in the world, and no one decision can prudently be
made which is not properly linked in with the great series

172 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

of other decisions which must accompany it, and it must
be reckoned in with the final result if the real quality and
character of that result are to be properly judged.

What we are doing is to hear the whole case; hear it
from the mouths of the men most interested; hear it from
those who are officially commissioned to state it; hear the
rival claims; hear the claims that affect new nationalities,
that affect new areas of the world, that affect new commer-
cial and economic connections that have been established
by the great world war through which we have gone, and I
have been struck by the moderateness of those who have
represented national claims.

I can testify that I have nowhere seen the gleam of passion.
I have seen earnestness, I have seen tears come to the eyes
of men who pled for downtrodden people whom they were
privileged to speak for; but they were not the tears of anger,
they were the tears of ardent hope. And I don't see how
any man can fail to have been subdued by these pleas;
subdued to this feeling, that he was not there to assert an
individual judgment of his own, but to try to assist the
cause of humanity.

And in the midst of it all every interest seeks out first
of all, when it reaches Paris, the representatives of the
United States. Why? Because — and I think I am
stating the most wonderful fact in history — because there
is no nation in Europe that suspects the motives of the
United States.

Was there ever so wonderful a thing seen before? Was
there ever so moving a thing? Was there ever any fact
that so bound the nation that had won that esteem forever
to deserve it?

I would not have you understand that the great men
who represent the other nations there in conference are

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 173

disesteemed by those who know them. Quite the con-
trary. But you understand that the nations of Europe
have again and again clashed with one another in com-
petitive interest. It is impossible for men to' forget those
sharp issues that were drawn between them in times past.
It is impossible for men to believe that all ambitions have
all of a sudden been foregone. They remember territory
that was coveted; they remember rights that it was
attempted to extort; tl^ey remember political ambitions
which it was attempted to realize — and, while they believe
that men have come into a different temper, they cannot
forget these things, and so they do not resort to one another
for a dispassionate view of the matters in controversy.
They resort to that nation which has won the enviable
distinction of being regarded as the friend of mankind.

Whenever it is desired to send a small force of soldiers
to occupy a piece of territory where it is thought nobody
else will be welcome, they ask for American soldiers, and
where other soldiers would be looked upon with suspicion
and perhaps met with resistance, the American soldier is
welcomed with acclaim.

I have had so many grounds for pride on the other side
of the water that I am very thankful that they are not
grounds for personal pride, but for national pride. If they
were grounds for personal pride, I'd be the most stuck-up
man in the world. And it has been an infinite pleasure to me
to see those gallant soldiers of ours, of whom the Constitu-
tion of the United States made me the proud Commander.
You may be proud of the Twenty-sixth Division, but I
commanded the Twenty-sixth Division, and see what they
did under my direction! And everybody praises the
American soldier with the feeling that in praising him he
is subtracting from the credit of no one else.

174 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

I have been searching for the fundamental fact that
converted Europe to believe in us. Before this war,
Europe did not believe in us as she does now. She did
not believe in us throughout the first three years of the
war. She seems really to have believed that we were
holding off because we thought we could make more by
staying out than by going in, and all of a sudden, in a
short eighteen months, the whole verdict is reversed. There
can be but one explanation for it. They saw what we did —
that without making a single claim we put all our men
and all our means at the disposal of those who were fighting
for their homes, in the first instance, but for a cause, the
cause of human rights and justice, and that we went in,
not to support their national claims, but to support the
great cause which they held in common. And when they
saw that America not only held ideals, but acted ideals,
they were converted to America and became firm partisans
of those ideals.

I met a group of scholars when I was in Paris — some
gentlemen from one of the Greek universities who had
come to see me, and in whose presence, or rather in the
presence of whose traditions of learning, I felt very young
indeed. I told them I had one of the delightful revenges
that sometimes comes to a man. All my life I had heard
men speak with a sort of condescension of ideals and of
idealists, and particularly those separated, encloistered
persons whom they choose to term academic, who were in
the habit of uttering ideals in the free atmosphere when
they clash with nobody in particular.

And I said I have had this sweet revenge. Speaking
with perfect frankness in the name of the people of the
United States, I have uttered, as the objects of this great
war, ideals, and nothing but ideals, and the war has been

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 175

won by that inspiration. Men were fighting with tense
muscle and lowered heads until they came to realize those
things, feeling they were fighting for their lives and their
country, and when these accents of what it was all about
reached them from America, they lifted their heads, they
raised their eyes to heaven, when they saw men in khaki
coming across the sea in the spirit of crusaders, and they
found that these were strange men, reckless of danger not
only, but reckless because they seemed to see something
that made that danger worth while.

Men have testified to me in Europe that our men were
possessed by something that they could only call a religious
fervor. They were not like any of the other soldiers. They
had a vision. They had a dream, and they were fighting
in the dream; and, fighting in the dream, they turned the
whole tide of battle, and it never came back.

One of our American himiorists, meeting the criticism
that American soldiers were not trained long enough, said:
**It takes only half as long to train an American soldier
as any other, because you only have to train him to go
one way." And he did only go one way, and he never
came back until he could do it when he pleased.

And now do you realize that this confidence we have
established throughout the world imposes a burden upon
us — if you choose to call it a burden? It is one of those
burdens which any nation ought to be proud to carry.
Any man who resists the present tides that run in the
world will find himself thrown upon a shore so high and
barren that it will seem as if he had been separated from
his human kind forever.

The Europe that I left the other day was full of some-
thing that it had never felt fill the heart so full before.
It was full of hope. The Europe of the second year of the

176 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

war, the Europe of the third year of the war, was sinking
to a sort of stubborn desperation. They did not see any
great thing to be achieved even when the war should be
won. They hoped there would be some salvage. They
hoped that they could clear their territories of invading
armies; they hoped they could set up their homes and start
their industries afresh, but they thought it would simply
be the resumption of the old life that Europe had led —
led in fear, led in anxiety, led in constant suspicious watch-
fulness. They never dreamed that it would be a Europe
of settled peace and of justified hope.

And now these ideals have wrought this new magic,
that all the peoples of Europe are buoyed up and confident
in the spirit of hope, because they believe that we are at
the eve of a new age in the world when nations will under-
stand one another, when nations will support one another
in every just cause, when nations will unite every moral
and every physical strength to see that the right shall
prevail.

If America were at this juncture to fail the world, what
would come of it? I do not mean any disrespect to any
other great people when I say that America is the hope of
the world, and if she does not justify that hope the results
are unthinkable. Men will be thrown back upon the
bitterness of disappointment not only, but the bitterness
of despair.

All nations will be set up as hostile camps again; the
men at the Peace Conference will go home with their heads
upon their breasts, knowing that they have failed— for
they were bidden not to come home from there until they
did something more than sign a treaty of peace.

Suppose we sign the treaty of peace, and that it is the
most satisfactory treaty of peace that the confusing elements

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 177

of the modem world will afford, and go home and think
about our labors. We will know that we have left written
upon the historic table at Versailles, upon which Vergennes
and Benjamin Franklin wrote their names, nothing but a
modem scrap of paper; no nations united to defend it, no
great forces combined to make it good, no assurance given
to the downtrodden and fearful people of the world that
they shall be safe. Any man who thinks that America will
take part in giving the world any such rebuff and disappoint-
ment as that does not know America.

I invite him to test the sentiments of the nation. We
set this nation up to make men free and we did not confine
our conception and purpose to America, and now we will
make men free. If we did not do that, all the fame of
America would be gone and all her power would be dis-
sipated. She would then have to keep her honor for those
narrow, selfish, provincial purposes which seem so dear to
some minds that have no sweep beyond the nearest horizon.
I should welcome no sweeter challenge than that. I have
fighting blood in me, and it is sometimes a delight to let
it have scope, but if it is a challenge on this occasion it
will be an indulgence. Think of the picture, think of the
utter blackness that would fall on the world. America has
failed ! America made a little essay at generosity and then
withdrew! America said, ** We are your friends," but it was
only for today, not for tomorrow! America said, "Here
is our power to vindicate right," and then the next day
said, ''Let right take care of itself and we will take care of
ourselves." America said, *'We set up a light to lead men
along the paths of liberty, but we have lowered it; it is
intended only to light our own path." We set up a great
ideal of liberty and then we said, ''Liberty is a thing that
you must win for yourself. Do not call upon us," and

178 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

think of the world that we would leave. Do you realize
how many nations are going to be set up in the presence
of old and powerful nations in Europe and left there, if
left by us, without a disinterested friend?

Do you believe in the Polish cause, as I do? Are you
going to set up Poland, immature, inexperienced, as yet
unorganized, and leave her with a circle of armies around
her? Do you believe in the aspirations of the Czecho-
slovaks and the Jugo-Slavs, as I do? Do you know
how many powers would be quick to pounce upon them
if there were not the guaranty of the world behind their
liberty?

Have you thought of the sufferings of Armenia? You
poured out your money to help succor the Armenians after
they suffered; now set up your strength so that they
shall never suffer again.

The arrangements of the present peace cannot stand a
generation unless they are guaranteed by the united forces
of the civilized world. And if we do not guarantee them,
can you not see the picture? Your hearts have instructed
you where the burden of this war fell. It did not fall upon
the national treasuries; it did not fall upon the instruments
of administration; it did not fall upon the resources of the
nations. It fell upon the voiceless homes everywhere where
women were toiling in hope that their men would come
back.

When I think of the homes upon which dull despair
would settle if this great hope is disappointed, I should
wish, for my part, never to have had America play any
part whatever in this attempt to emancipate the world.
But I talk as if there were any question. I have no more
doubt of the verdict of America in this matter than I have
doubt of the blood that is in me.

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 179

And so, my fellow citizens, I have come back to report
progress, and I do not believe that the progress is going
to stop short of the goal. The nations of the world have
set their heads now to do a great thing, and they are not
going to slacken their purpose. And when I speak of the
nations of the world, I do not speak of the governments
of the world. I speak of the peoples who constitute the
nations of the world. They are in the saddle, and they are
going to see to it that if their present governments do not
do their will, some other governments shall. And the
secret is out and the present governments know it.

There is a great deal of harmony to be got out of common
knowledge. There is a great deal of sympathy to be got
out of living in the same atmosphere, and except for the
differences of languages, which puzzled my American ear
very sadly, I could have believed I was at home in France,
OP in Italy, or in England when I was on the streets, when
I was in the presence of the crowds, when I was in great
halls, where men were gathered together irrespective of
class. I did not feel quite as much at home there as
I do here, but I felt that now, at any rate, after this
storm of war had cleared the air, men were seeing eye to
eye everywhere and that these were the kind of folks
who would understand what the kind of folks at home
would under stand and that they were thinking the same
things.

My feelings about you remind me of a story by that
excellent wit and good artist, Oliver Herford, who one day,
sitting at luncheon at his club, was slapped vigorously on
the back by a man whom he did not know very well. He
said: ''Oliver, old boy, how are you?" He looked at him
rather coldly. He said: "I don't know your name; I don't
know your face, but your manners are very familiar."

i8o AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

And I must say that your manners are very familiar, and
let me add, very delightful.

It is a great comfort, for one thing, to realize that you
all understand the language I am speaking. A friend of
mine said that to talk through an interpreter was like
witnessing the compound fracture of an idea. But the
beauty of it is that, whatever the impediments of the channel
of communication, the idea is the same, that it gets regis-
tered, and it gets registered in responsive hearts and receptive
purposes.

I have come back for a strenuous attempt to transact
business for a little while in America, but I have really
come back to say to you, in all soberness and honesty, that
I have been trying my best to speak your thoughts.

When I sample myself, I think I find that I am a typical
American, and if I sample deep enough, and get down to
what is probably the true stuff of a man, then I have hope
that it is part of the stuff that is like the other fellows at
home.

And, , therefore, probing deep in my heart and trying to
see the things that are right without regard to the things
that may be debated as expedient, I feel that I am inter-
preting the pinpose and the thought of America; and in
loving America I find I have joined the great majority of
^ly fellow men throughout the world.

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES i8i

AT NEW YORK

On the evening of March 4 President Wilson spoke in the Metro-
politan Opera House to a throng which filled that spacious auditorium
to overflowing.

Former President Taft spoke just before the President made his
address, explaining the principles of the League and answering its
critics. The two speakers received an ovation from the audience.
Signor Caruso sang a verse of "The Star-Spangled Banner" before
the speaking began.

After the meeting the President went^direct to the " George Wash-
ington" and sailed for France early the next morning.

My Fellow Citizens: I accept the intimation of the air
just played; I will not come back ''till it's over, over
there." And yet, I pray God, in the interest of peace and
of the world, that that may be soon.

The first thing that I am going to tell the people on the
other side of the water is that an overwhelming majority
of the American people is in favor of the League of Nations.
I know that that is true. I have had unmistakable intima-
tions of it from all parts of the country, and the voice rings
true in every case.

I count myself fortunate to speak here under the unusual
circumstances of this evening. I am happy to associate
myself with Mr. Taft in this great cause. He has dis-
played an elevation of view and a devotion to pu!!Aic duty
which is beyond praise. ,^.

And I am the more happy because this means tnat this
is not a party issue. No party has the right to appro-
priate this issue, and no party will, in the long run, dare
oppose it.

We have listened to so clear and admirable an exposition
of many of the main features of the proposed covenant of
the League of Nations that it is perhaps not necessary for

1 82 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONvS

me to discuss in any particular way the contents of the
document. I will seek rather to give you its setting.

I do not know when I have been more impressed than by
the conferences of the commission set up by the Conference
of Peace to draw up a covenant for the League of Nations.
The representatives of fourteen nations sat around that
board — not young men, not men inexperienced in the
affairs of their own countries, not men inexperienced in the
politics of the world — and the inspiring influence of any
meeting was the concurrence of purpose on the part of all
those men to come to an agreement, and an effective working
agreement, with regard to this league of the civilized world.

There was a conviction in the whole impulse; there was
conviction of more than one sort, there was the conviction
that this thing ought to be done, and there was also the
conviction that not a man there would venture to go home
and say that he had not tried to do it.

Mr. Taft has set the picture for you of what a failure of
. this great purpose would mean. We have been hearing
for all these weary months that this agony of war has
lasted because of the sinister purpose of the Central Empires,
and we have made maps of the course that they meant their
conquests to take. Where did the lines of that map lie,
of that central line that we used to call from Bremen to
Bagdad?

They lay through these very regions to which Mr. Taft
has called your attention, but they lay then through
united empire — through the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
whose integrity Germany was bound to respect as her
ally — lay in the path of that line of conquest. The
Turkish Empire, whose interests she professed to make her
own, lay in the direct path that she intended to tread.

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 183

And now what has happened? The Austro-Hungarian
Empire has gone to pieces, and the Turkish Empire has
disappeared, and the nations that effected that great result
— for it was a result of liberation — are now responsible as
the trustees of the assets of those great nations.

You not only would have weak nations lying in this path,
but you would have nations in which that old poisonous
seed of intrigue could be planted with the certainty that
the crop would be abundant, and one of the things that the
League of Nations is intended to watch is the course of
intrigue.

Intrigue cannot stand publicity, and if the League of
Nations were nothing but a great debating society, it would
kill intrigue.

It is one of the agreements of this covenant that it is the
friendly right of every nation a member of the League to
call attention to anything that it thinks will disturb the
peace of the world, no matter where that thing is occurring.

There is no subject that may touch the peace of the
world which is exempt from inquiry and discussion, and I
think everybody here present will agree with me that
Germany would never have gone to war if she had per-
mitted the world to discuss the aggression upon Serbia for
a single week.

The British Foreign Office suggested, it pleaded, that
there might be a day or two delay so that the representa-
tives of the nations of Europe could get together and discuss
the possibilities of a settlement. Germany did not dare
permit a day*s discussion. You know what happened. So
soon as the world realized that an outlaw was at large these
nations began one by one to draw together against her.

We know for a certainty that if Germany had thought

i84 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

for a moment that Great Britain would go in with France
and with Russia she never would have undertaken the
enterprise. And the League of Nations is meant as a
notice to all outlaw nations that not only Great Britain,
but the United States and the rest of the world, will go in
to stop enterprises of that sort.

And so the League of Nations is nothing more nor less
than the covenant that the world will always maintain the
standards which it has now vindicated by some of the
most precious blood ever spilled.

The liberated peoples of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
and of the Turkish Empire call out to us for this thing.
It has not arisen in the council of statesmen. Europe is a
bit sick at heart at this very moment because it sees that
statesmen have had no vision and that the only vision has
been the vision of the people. Those who suffer see. Those
against whom wrong is wrought know how desirable is the
right and the righteous.

The nations that have long been under the heel of the
Austrian, that have long cowered before the German, that
have long suffered the indescribable agonies of being gov-
erned by the Turk, have called out to the world, generation
after generation, for justice, for liberation, for succor; and
no cabinet in the world has heard them.

Private organizations, pitying hearts, philanthropic men
and women, have poured out their treasure in order to
relieve these sufferings, but no nation has said to the nations
responsible: **You must stop; this thing is intolerable, and
we will not permit," and the vision has been with the people.

My friends, I wish you would reflect upon this proposition.
The vision as* to what is necessary for great reforms has
seldom come from the top in the nations of the world.

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 185

It has come from the need and the aspiration and the self-
assertion of great bodies of men who meant to be free, and
I can explain some of the criticisms which have been leveled
against this great enterprise only by the supposition that
the men who utter the criticisms have never felt the pulse
of the great heart of the world.

And I am amazed — not alarmed, but amazed — that
there should be in some quarters such a comprehensive
ignorance of the state of the world. Those gentlemen do
not know what the mind of men is just now. Everybody
else does. I do not know where they have been closeted,
I do not know by what influences they have been blinded;
but I do know that they have been separated from the
general currents of the thought of mankind.

And I want to utter this solemn warning, not in the way
of a threat — the forces of the world do not threaten; they
operate. The great tides of the world do not give notice
that they are going to rise and run; they rise in their
majesty and overwhelming might, and those who stand in
the way are overwhelmed.

Now the heart of the world is awake, and the heart of ^
the world must be satisfied. Do not let yourselves suppose / /
for a moment that the uneasiness in the populations of /^
Europe is due entirely to economic causes or economic I
motives; something very much deeper underlies it all thany
that.

They see that their governments have never been ahle^ l
to defend them against intrigue or aggression and that flw
there is no force of foresight or of prudence in any modem^y
cabinet to stop war. / ^

And therefore they say, ''There must be some funda-
mental cause for this," and the fundamental cause they are

i86 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

beginning to perceive to be that nations have stood singly
or in little jealous groups against each other, fostering
prejudice and increasing the danger of war, rather than
concerting measures to prevent it ; and that if there is right
in the world, if there is justice in the world, there is no
reason why nations should be divided in the support of
justice.

They are therefore saying if you really believe that there ■
is a right, if you really believe that wars ought to be stopped,
stop thinking about the rival interests of nations and think
about men and women and children throughout the world.

Nations are not made to afford distinction to their rulers
by way of success in the manoeuvres of politics; nations are
meant, if they are meant for anything, to make the men
and women and children in them secure and happy and
prosperous, and no nation has the right to set up its special
interests against the interests and benefits of mankind,
least of all this great nation which we love.

It was set up for the benefit of mankind; it was set up
to illustrate the highest ideals and to achieve the highest
aspirations of men who wanted to be free; and the world —
the world of to-day — believes that and counts on us, and
would be thrown back into the blackness of despair if we
deserted it.

I have tried once and again, my fellow citizens, to say
to little circles of friends or to larger bodies what seems to
be the real hope of the peoples of Europe, and I tell you
frankly I have not been able to do so, because when the
thought tries to crowd inself into speech the profound
emotion of the thing is too much; speech will not carry.
I have felt the tragedy of the hope of those suffering peoples.

It is tragedy because it is a hope which cannot be realized

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 187

in its perfection, and yet I have felt besides its tragedy its
compulsion, its compulsion upon every living man to
exercise every influence that he has to the utmost to see
that as little as possible of that hope is disappointed, because
if men cannot now, after this agony of bloody sweat, come
to their self-possession and see how to regulate the affairs
of the world, we will sink back into a period of struggle in
which there will be no hope, and, therefore, no mercy.

There can be no mercy where there is no hope, for
why should you spare another if you yourself expect to
perish? Why should you be pitiful if you can get no pity?
Why should you be just if upon every hand you are put
upon ?

There is another thing which I think the critics of this
covenant have not observed. They not only have not
observed the temper of the world, but they have not even
observed the temper of those splendid boys in khaki that
they sent across the seas. I have had the proud con-
sciousness of the reflected glory of those boys, because the
Constitution made me their Commander-in-Chief, and they
have taught me some lessons.

When we went into the war we went into it on the basis
of declarations which it was my privilege to utter, because
I believed them to be an interpretation of, the purpose and
thought of the people of the United States.

And those boys went over there with the feeling that
they were sacredly bound to the realization of those ideals;
that they were not only going over there to beat Germany;
they were not going over there merely with resentment in
their hearts against a particular outlaw nation; but that
they were crossing those three thousand miles of sea in
order to show to Europe that the United States, when it

i88 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

became necessary, would go anywhere the rights of man-
kind were threatened.

They would not sit still in the trenches. They would
not be restrained by the prudence of experienced Continental
commanders. They thought they had come over there to
do a particular thing, and they were going to do it and do
it at once.

And just as soon as that rush of spirit as well as rush of
body came in contact with the lines of the enemy they
began to break, and they continued to break until the end.
They continued to break, my fellow citizens, not merely
because of the physical force of those lusty youngsters,
but because of the irresistible spiritual force of the armies
of the United States.

It was that they felt. It was that that awed them. It
was that that made them feel that if these youngsters
ever got a foothold they could never be dislodged, and
that therefore every foot of ground that they won was
permanently won for the liberty of mankind.

And do you suppose that having felt that crusading spirit
of these youngsters, who went over there, not to glorify
America, but to serve their fellow men, I am going to
permit myself for one moment to slacken in my effort to
be worthy of them and of their cause? What I said at
the opening I said with a deeper meaning than perhaps
you have caught. I do mean not to come back until it's
over over there, and it must not be over until the nations
of the world are assured of the permanency of peace.

Gentlemen on this side of the water would be very much
profited by getting into communication with some gentle-
men on the other side of the water. We sometimes think,
my fellow citizens, that the experienced statesmen of the

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 189

European nations are an unusually hard-headed set of men,
by which we generally mean, although we do not admit it,
that they are a bit cynical; that they say, "This is a very
practical world," by which you always mean that it is not
an ideal world; that they do not believe that things can be
settled upon an ideal basis.

Well, I never came into intimate contact with them
before, but if they used to be that way, they are not that
way now. They have been subdued, if that was once
their temper, by the awful significance of recent events
and the awful importance of what is to ensue; and there is
not one of them with whom I have come in contact who
does not feel that he cannot in conscience return to his
people from Paris unless he has done his utmost to do some-
thing more than attach his name to a treaty of peace.

Every man in that Conference knows that the treaty of
peace in itself will be inoperative, as Mr. Taft has said,
without this constant support and energy of a great organi-
zation such as is supplied by the League of Nations.

And men who when I first went over there were skeptical
of the possibility of forming a League of Nations admitted
that if we could but form it, it would be an invaluable
instrumentality through which to secure the operation of
the various parts of the treaty; and when that treaty comes
back gentlemen on this side will find the covenant not only
in it, but so many threads of the treaty tied to the covenant
that you cannot dissect the covenant from the treaty
without destroying the whole vital structure. The structure
of peace^ will not be vital without the League of Nations,
and no mail is going to bring back a cadaver with him.

I must say that I have been puzzled by some of the criti-
cisms; not by the criticisms themselves — I can understand

190 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

them perfectly, even when there was no foundation for
them — but the fact of the criticism. I cannot imagine how
these gentlemen can live and not live in the atmosphere of
the world.

I cannot imagine how they can live and not be in contact
with the events of their times, and I particularly cannot
imagine how they can be Americans and set up a doctrine
of careful selfishness thought out to the last detail.

I have heard no counsel of generosity in their criticism.
I have heard no constructive suggestion. I have heard
nothing except "Will it not be dangerous to us to help the
world?" It would be fatal to us not to help it.

From being what I will venture to call the most famous
and the most powerful nation in the world we would of a
sudden have become the most contemptible. So I did not
need to be told, as I have been told, that the people of the
United States would support this covenant. I am an
American and I knew they would.

What a sweet revenge it is upon the world. They
laughed at us once; they thought we did not mean our
professions of principle. They thought so until April of
19 1 7. It was hardly credible to them that we would do
more than send a few men over and go through the forms
'of helping, and when they saw multitudes hastening across
the sea, and saw what those multitudes were eager to do
when they got to the other side, they stood at amaze and
said, **The thing is real! This nation is the friend of man-
kind, as it said it was!"

The enthusiasm, the hope, the trust, the confidence in
the future bred by that change of view, is indescribable.
Take an individual American and you may often find him
selfish and confined to his special interests; but take the

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 191

American in the mass and he is wilHng to die for an idea.

The sweet revenge, therefore, is this: that we believed in
righteousness, and now we are ready to make the supreme
sacrifice for it, the supreme sacrifice of throwing in our
fortunes with the fortunes of men everywhere.

Mr. Taft was speaking of Washington's utterance about
entangUng alHances, and if he will permit me to say so, he
put the exactly right interpretation upon what Washington
said, the interpretation that is inevitable if you read what
he said, as most of these gentlemen do not. And the thing
that Washington longed for was just what we are now about
to supply — an arrangement which will disentangle all
entangling alliances in the world.

Nothing entangles, nothing enmeshes a man, except a
selfish combination with somebody else. Nothing entangles
a nation, hampers it, binds it, except to enter into a com-
bination with some other nation against the other nations
of the world. And this great disentanglement of all alliances
is now to be accomplished by this covenant, because one of
the covenants is that no nation shall enter into any rela-
tionship with another nation inconsistent with the covenants
of the League of Nations. Nations promise not to make
combinations against each other. Nations agree that there
shall be but one combination, and that is the combination
of all against the wrong-doer.

And so I am going back to my task on the other side with
renewed vigor. I had not forgotten what the spirit of the
American people is, but I have been immensely refreshed by
coming in contact with it again. I did not know how good
home felt until I got here.

The only place a man can feel at home is where nothing
has to be explained to him. Nothing has to be explained

192 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

to me in America, least of all the sentiment of the American
people. I mean, about great fundamental things like this.
There are many differences of judgment, as to policy, and
perfectly legitimate. Sometimes profound differences of
judgment, but those are not differences of sentiment, those
are not differences of purpose, those are not differences of
ideals. And the advantage of not having to have anything
explained to you is that you recognize a wrong explanation
when you hear it.

In a certain rather abandoned part of the frontier at one
time it was said they found a man who told the truth; he
was not found telling it, but he could tell it when he heard it.
And I think I am in that situation with regard to some of the
criticisms I have heard. They do not make any impression
on me, because I know there is no medium that will transmit
them, and that the sentiment of the country is proof against
such narrowness and such selfishness as that.

I commend these gentlemen to communion with their
fellow citizens.

What are we to say, then, as to the future? I think, my
fellow citizens, that we can look forward to it with great
confidence. I have heard cheering news since I came to this
side of the water about the progress that is being made in
Paris toward the discussion and clarification of a great many
difficult matters. And I believe that settlements will begin
to be made rather rapidly from this time on at those confer-
ences. But what I believe — what I know as well as believe
— is this: That the men engaged in those conferences are
gathering heart as they go, not losing it; that they are find-
ing community of purpose and community of ideal to an extent
that perhaps they did not expect, and that amidst all the
interplay of influence — because it is infinitely complicated

ANNOUNCEMENTS, ADDRESSES, AND RESPONSES 193

— amidst all the interplay of influence, there is a forward
movement which is running toward the right. Men have
at last perceived that the only permanent thing in the
world is the right, and that a wrong settlement is bound to
be a temporary settlement — bound to be a temporary settle-
ment for the very best reason of all — that it ought to be
a temporary settlement, and the spirits of men will rebel
against it, and the spirits of men are now in the saddle.

When I was in Italy, a little limping group of wounded
Italian soldiers sought an interview with me. I could not
conjecture what it was they were going to say to me, and
with the greatest simplicity, with a touching simplicity, they
presented me with a petition in favor of the League of
Nations. Their wounded limbs, their impaired vitality,
were the only argument they brought with them. It was
a simple request that I lend all the influence I might happen
to have to relieve future generations of the sacrifices that
they had been obliged to make. That appeal has remained
in my mind as I have ridden along the streets of European
capitals and heard cries of the crowds, cries for the League
of Nations from lips of people who, I venture to say, had no
particular vision of how it was to be done, who were not
ready to approve a plan for a League of Nations, but whose
hearts said that something by way of a combination of all
men everywhere must come out of this. As we drove along
country roads, weak old women would come out and hold
flowers to us. Why should they hold flowers up to strangers
from across the Atlantic? Only because they believed we
were the messengers of friendship, and of hope, and those
flowers were their humble offerings of gratitude that friends
from so great a distance should have brought them so great
a hope.

194 AMERICA AND THE LEAGUE OP NATIONS

It is inconceivable that we should disappoint them, and
we shall not. The day will come when men in America will
look back with swelling hearts and rising pride that they
should have been privileged to make the sacrifice which I am
now to make in order to combine their might and their moral
power with the cause of justice for men of every kind every-
where. God give us the strength and vision to do it wisely.
God give us the privilege of knowing we did it without count-
ing the cost and because we were true Americans, lovers of
liberty and the right.

THE APPENDIX

THE FOURTEEN POINTS

I. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at; after which there
shall be no private international understandings of any kind, but
diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.

II. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside terri-
torial waters, alike in peace and in war, except as the seas may be
closed in whole or in part by international action for the enforcement
of international covenants.

III. The removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and
the establishment of an equality of trade conditions among all the
nations consenting to the peace and associating themselves for its
maintenance.

IV. Adequate guaranties given and taken that national armaments
will be reduced to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety.

V. A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all
colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that
in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the
populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable
claims of the Government whose title is to be determined.

VI. The evacuation of all Russian territory, and such a settlement
of all questions affecting Russia as will secure the best and freest
cooperation of the other nations of the world in obtaining for her an '
unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the independent
determination of her own political development and national policy,
and assure her of a sincere welcome into the society of free nations
under institutions of her own choosing; and, more than a welcome,
assistance also of every kind that she may need and may herself desire.
The treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations in the months
to come will be the acid test of their good will, of their comprehension
of her needs as distinguished from their own interests, and of their
intelligent and unselfish sympathy.

VII. Belgium, the whole world will agree, must be evacuated and
restored without any attempt to limit the sovereignty which she
enjoys in common with all other free nations. No other single act
will serve as this will serve to restore confidence among the nations
in the laws which they have themselves set and determined for the

197

198. THE APPENDIX

government of their relations with one another. Without this healing
act the whole structure and validity of international law is forever
impaired.

VIII. All French territory should be freed and the invaded portions
restored; and the wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871 in the
matter of Alsace-Lorraine, which has unsettled the peace of the world
for nearly fifty years, should be righted, in-order that peace may
once more be made sectire in the interest of all.

IX. A readjustment of the frontiers of Italy should be effected
along clearly recognizable lines of nationality.

X. The peoples of Austria-Hungary, whose place among the nations
we wish to see safeguarded and assured, should be accorded the freest
opportunity of autonomous development.

XI. Rumania, Serbia, and Montenegro should be evacuated;
occupied territories restored; Serbia accorded free and secure access
to the sea ; and the relations of the several Balkan States to one another «
determined by friendly counsel along historically established lines of
allegiance and nationality; and international guaranties of the political
and economic independence and territorial integrity of the several
Balkan States should be entered into.

XII. The Turkish portions of the present Ottoman Empire should
be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which
are now under Tiu-kish rule should be assured an undoubted security
of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous
development, and the Dardanelles should be permanently opened as
a free passage to the ships and commerce of all nations under inter-
national guaranties.

XIII. An independent Polish State should be erected which should
include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations,
which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea, and whose
political and economic independence and territorial integrity should
be guaranteed by international covenant.

XIV. A general association of nations must be formed, under
specific covenants, for the purpose of affording mutual guaranties of
political independence and territorial integrity to great and small
States alike.

CONSTITUTION OF THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

COVENANT PREAMBLE

In order to promote international cooperation and to secure inter-
national peace and security by the acceptance of obligations not to
resort to war, by the prescription of open, just, and honorable relations
between nations, by the firm establishment of the understandings of
international law as the actual r61e of conduct among Governments,
and by the maintenance of justice and a scrupulous respect for all
treaty obligations in the dealings of organized peoples with one another,
the Powers signatory to this covenant adopt this Constitution of the
League of Nations:

ARTICLE I

The action of the high contracting parties under the terms of this
covenant shall be effected through the instrumentality of meeting of
a body of delegates representing the high contracting parties, of
meetings at more frequent intervals of an Executive Council, and of
a permanent international secretariat to be established at the seat
of the League.

ARTICLE II

Meetings of the body of delegates shall be held at stated intervals
and from time to time as occasion may require for the purpose of
dealing with matters within the sphere of action of the League.
Meetings of the body of delegates shall be held at the seat of the
League or at such other place as may be found convenient and shall
consist of representatives of the high contracting parties. Each of
the high contracting parties shall have one vote, but may not have
more than three representatives.

ARTICLE III

The Executive Council shall consist of representatives of the United
States of America, the British Empire, France, Italy, and Japan,
together with representatives of four other States, members of the
League. The selection of these four States shall be made by the body
of delegates on such principles and in such manner as they think fit.

199

200 THE APPENDIX

Pending the appointment of these representatives of the other States
representatives of . . . shall be members of the Executive
Council.

Meetings of the Council shall be held from time to time as occasion
may require and at least once a year at whatever place may be decided
on, or, failing any such decision, at the seat of the League, and any
matter within the sphere of action of the League or affecting the
peace of the world may be dealt with at such meetings.

Invitations shall be sent to any Power to attend a meeting of the
Council at which matters directly affecting its interests are to be
discussed, and no decision taken at any meeting will be binding on
such Power unless so invited.

. ARTICLE IV

All matters of procedure at meetings of the body of delegates or •
the Executive Council, including the appointing of committees to
investigate particular matters, shall be regulated by the body of
delegates or the Executive Council and may be decided by a majority
of the States represented at the meeting.

The first meeting of the body of delegates and of the Executive
Council shall be summoned by the President of the United States
of America.

ARTICLE v f .

The permanent secretariat of the League shall be established at ^^ '
which shall constitute the seat of the League. The secretariat shall
comprise such secretaries and staff as may be required under the
general direction and control of a Secretary- General of the League,
who shall be chosen by the Executive Council; the secretariat shall
be appointed by the Secretary-General subject to confirmation by the
Executive Council.

The Secretary-General shall act in that capacity at all meetings
of the body of delegates or of the Executive Council.

The expenses of the secretariat shall be borne by the States members
of the League in accordance with the apportionment of the expenses
of the International Bureau of the Universal Postal Union.

ARTICLE VI

Representatives of the high contracting parties and officials of the
League when engaged on the business of the League shall enjoy

THE APPENDIX 201

diplomatic privileges and immunities, and the buildings occupied by
the League or its officials or by representatives attending its meetings
shall enjoy the benefits of extra-territoriality.

ARTICLE VIT

Admission to the League of States not signatories to the covenant
and not named in the protocol hereto as States to be invited to adhere
to the covenant requires the assent of not less than two-thirds of the
States represented in the body of delegates, and shall be limited to
fully self-governing countries, inckiding dominions and colonies.

No State shall be admitted to the League unless it is able to give
effective guaranties of its sincere intention to observe its international
obligations and unless it shall conform to such principles as may be
prescribed by the League in regard to its naval and military forces
and armaments.

ARTICLE VIII

The high contracting parties recognize the principle that the main-
tenance of peace will require the reduction of national armaments to
the lowest point consistent with national safety and the enforcement
by common action of international obligations, having special regard
to the geographical situation and circumstances of each State; and
the Executive Council shall formulate plans for effecting such reduction.
The Executive Council shall also determine for the consideration and
action of the several Governments what military equipment and
armament is fair and reasonable in proportion to the scale of forces
laid down in the program of disarmament; and these limits, when
adopted, shall not be exceeded without the permission of the Executive
Council.

The high contracting parties agree that the manufacture by private
enterprise of munitions and implements of war lends itself to grave
objections, and direct the Executive Council to advise how the evil
effects attendant upon such manufacture can be prevented, due
regard being made to the necessities of these countries which are not
able to manufacture for themselves the munitions and implements
of war necessary for their safety.

The high contracting parties undertake in no way to conceal from
each other the condition of such of their industries as are capable of
being adapted to warlike purposes or the scale of their armaments,
and agree that there shall be full and frank interchange of information
as to their military and naval programs.

202 THE APPENDIX

ARTICLE IX

A permanent commission shall be constituted to advise the League
on the execution of the provisions of Article VIII and on military and
naval questions generally.

ARTICLE X

The high contracting parties undertake to respect and preserve as
against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political
independence of all States members of the League. In case of any
such aggression or in case of any threat or danger of such aggression
the Executive Council shall advise upon the means by which the
obligation shall be fulfilled.

ARTICLE XI

Any war or threat of war, whether immediately affecting any of
the high contracting parties or not, is hereby declared a matter of
concern to the League, and the high contracting parties reserve the
right to take any action that may be deemed wise and effectual to
safeguard the peace of nations.

It is hereby also declared and agreed to be the friendly right of
each of the high contracting parties to draw the attention of the body
of delegates or of the Executive Council to any circumstances affecting
international intercourse which threaten to disturb international
peace or the good understanding between nations upon which peace
depends.

ARTICLE XII

The high contracting parties agree that should a dispute arise
between them which cannot be adjusted by the ordinary processes
of diplomacy, they will in no case resort to war without previously
submitting the questions and matters involved either to arbitration
or to inquiry by the Executive Council and until three months after
the award by the arbitrators or a recommendation by the Executive
Council, and that they will not even then resort to war as against a
member of the League which complies with the award of the arbitrators
or the recommendation of the Executive Council.

In any case under this article, the award of the arbitrators shall
be made within a reasonable time, and the recommendation of the
Executive Council shall be made within six months after the sub-
mission of the dispute.

THE APPENDIX 203

ARTICLE XIII

The high contracting parties agree that whenever any dispute or
difficulty shall arise between them which they recognize to be suitable
for submission to arbitration and which cannot be satisfactorily settled
by diplomacy, they will submit the whole matter to arbitration. For
this purpose the court of arbitration to which the case is referred
shall be the court agreed on by the parties or stipulated in any con-
vention existing between them.

The high contracting parties agree that they will carry out in full
good faith any award that may be rendered. In the event of any
failure to carry out the award, the Executive Council shall propose
what steps can best be given to give effect thereto.

ARTICLE XIV

The Executive Council shall formulate plans for the establishment
of a permanent court of international justice, and this court shall,
when established, be competent to hear and determine any matter
which the parties recognize as suitable for submission to it for arbi-
tration under the foregoing article.

ARTICLE XV

If there should arise between States members of the League any
dispute likely to lead to rupture, which is not submitted to arbitration
as above, the high contracting parties agree that they will refer the
matter to the Executive Council; either party to the dispute may
give notice of the existence of the dispute to the Secretary-General,
who will make all necessary arrangements for a full investigation
and consideration thereof. For this purpose the parties agree to
communicate to the Secretary-General, as promptly as possible,
statements of their case with all the relevant facts and papers, and
the Executive Council may forthwith direct the publication thereof.

Where the efforts of the Council lead to the settlement of the dispute
a statement shall be published indicating the nature of the dispute
and the terms of settlement, together with such explanations as may
be appropriate. If the dispute has not been settled, a report by the
Council shall be published, setting forth with all necessary facts and
explanations the recommendation which the Council thinks just and
proper for the settlement of the dispute. If the report is unanimously
agreed to by the members of the Council other than the parties to
the dispute, the high contracting parties agree that they will not go

204 THE APPENDIX

to war with any party which complies with the recommendations
and that, if any party shall refuse so to comply, the Council shall
propose measures necessary to give effect to the recommendation.
If no such unanimous report can be made, it shall be the duty of
the majority and the privilege of the minority to issue statements
indicating what they believe to be the facts and containing the rea-
sons which they consider to be just and proper.

The Executive Council may in any case under this article refer
the dispute to the body of delegates. The dispute shall be so referred
at the request of either party to the dispute, provided that such request
must be made within fourteen days after the submission of the dispute.
In any case referred to the body of delegates all the provisions of
this article and of Article XII relating to the action and powers of
the Executive Council shall apply to the action and powers of the
body of delegates.

• ARTICLE XVI

Should any of the high contracting parties break or disregard its
covenants under Article XII, it shall thereby de facto be deemed to
have committed an act of war against all the other members of the
League, which hereby undertake immediately to subject it to the
severance of all trade or financial relations, the prohibition of all
intercourse between their nations and the nations of the covenant-
breaking State, and the prevention of all financial, commercial, or
personal intercourse between the nations of the covenant-breaking
State and the nations of any other State, whether a member of the
League or not.

It shall be the duty of the Executive Council in such case to recomj-
mend what effective military or naval force the members of the League
shall severally contribute to the armed forces to be used to protect
the covenants of the League.

The high contracting parties agree further that they will mutually
support one another in the financial and economic measures which
may be taken imder this article, in order to minimize the loss and
inconvenience resulting from the above measures, and that they will
mutually support one another in resisting any special measures aimed
at one of their number by the covenant-breaking State, and that they
will afford passage through their territory to the forces of any of the
high contracting parties who are cooperating to protect the covenants
of the League.

THE APPENDIX 205

ARTICLE XVII

In the event of disputes between one State member of the League
and another State which is not a member of the League, or between
States not members of the League, the high contracting parties agree
that the State or States not members of the League shall be invited to
accept the obligations of membership in the League for the purposes
of such dispute, upon such conditions as the Executive Council may
deem just, and upon acceptance of any such invitation the above
provisions shall be applied with such modifications as fnay be deemed
necessary by the League.

Upon such invitation being given, the Executive Council shall
immediately institute an inquiry into the circumstances and merits
of the dispute and recommend such action as may seem best and
most effectual in the circumstances.

In the event of a Power so invited refusing to accept the obligations
of membership in the League for the purposes of such dispute, and
taking any action against a State member of the League which in the
case of a State member of the League would constitute a breach of
Article XII, the provisions of Article XVI shall be applicable as
against the State taking such action.

If both parties to the dispute, when so invited, refuse to accept
the obligations of membership in the League for the purpose of such
dispute, the Executive Council may take such action and make such
recommendations as will prevent hostilities and will result in the
settlement of the dispute.

ARTICLE XVIII

The high contracting parties agree that the League shall be intrusted
with general supervision of the trade in arms and ammunition with
the countries in which the control of this traffic is necessary in the
common interests.

ARTICLE XIX

To those colonies and territories which as a consequence of the
late war have ceased to be under the sovereignty of the States
which formerly governed them and which are inhabited by peoples not
yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of
the modern world, there should be applied the principle that the
well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of

2o6 THE APPENDIX

civilization and that securities for the performance of this trust
should be embodied in the constitution of the League.

The best method of giving practical effect to this principle is that
the tutelage of such peoples should be intrusted to advanced nations
who by reason of their resources, their experience, or their geographical
position can best undertake this responsibility, and that this tutelage
should be exercised by them as mandatories on behalf of the League.
The character of the mandate must differ according to the stage
of the development of the people, the geographical situation of the
territory, its economic conditions, and other similar circumstances.

Certain commtmities formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire
have reached a stage of development where their existence as inde-
pendent nations can be provisionally recognized subject to the render-
ing of administrative advice and assistance by a mandatory Power
until such time as they are able to stand alone. The wishes of these
communities must be a principal consideration in the selection of the
mandatory Power.

Other peoples, especially those of Central Africa, are at such a stage
that the mandatory must be responsible for the administration of the
territory subject to conditions which will guarantee freedom of con-
science or religion, subject only tp the maintenance of public order
and morals, the prohibition of abuses such as the slave trade, the arms
traffic and the liquor traffic, and the prevention of the establishment
of fortifications or military and naval bases and of military training
of the natives for other than police purposes and the defense of terri-
tory, and will also secure equal opportunities for the trade and commerce
of other members of the League.

There are territories, such as Southwest Africa and certain of the
South Pacific Isles, which, owing to the sparseness of their population,
or their small size, or their remoteness from the centers of civilization,
or their geographical continuity to the mandatory State, and other
circumstances, can be best administered under the laws of the man-
datory State as integral portions thereof, subject to the safeguards
above mentioned in the interests of the indigenous population.

In every case of mandate, the mandatory State shall render to the
League an annual report in reference to the territory committed to
its charge.

The decree of authority, control, or administration to be exercised
by the mandatory State shall, if not previously agreed upon by the

THE APPENDIX 207

high contracting parties, in each case be explicitly defined by the
Executive Council in a special act or charter.

The high contracting parties further agree to establish at the
seat of the League a mandatory commission to receive and examine
the annual report of the mandatory Powers, and to assist the League
in insuring the observance of the terms of all mandates.

ARTICLE XX

The high contracting parties will endeavor to secure and maintain
fair and humane conditions of labor for men, women, and children
both in their own countries and in all countries to which their com-
mercial and industrial relations extend; and to that end agree to
establish as part of the organization of the League a permanent Bureau
of Labor.

ARTICLE XXI

The high contracting parties agree that provision shall be made
through the instrumentality of the League to secure and maintain
freedom of transit and equitable treatment for the commerce of all
States members of the League, having in mind, among other things,
special arrangements with regard to the necessities of the regions
devastated during the war of 1914-1918.

ARTICLE XXII

The high contracting parties agree to place under the control of
the League all international bureaus already established by general
treaties if the parties to such treaties consent. Furthermore, they
agree that all such international bureaus to be constituted in future
shall be placed under the control of the League.

ARTICLE XXIII

The high contracting parties agree that every treaty or international
engagement entered into hereafter by any State member of the League
shall be forthwith registered with the Secretary-General and as soon
as possible published by him, and that no such treaty or international
engagement shall be binding until so registered.

ARTICLE XXIV

It shall be the right of the body of delegates from time to time to
advise the reconsideration by States members of the League of treaties
which have become inapplicable, and of international conditions of
which the continuance may endanger the peace of the world.

2o8 THE APPENDIX

ARTICLE XXV

The high contracting parties severally agree that the present cove-
nant is accepted as abrogating all obligations inter se which are incon-
sistent with the terms thereof, and solemnly engage that they will
not hereafter enter into any engagements inconsistent with the terms
thereof. In case any of the Powers signatory hereto or subsequently
admitted to the League shall, before becoming a party to this cove-
nant, have undertaken any obligations which are inconsistent with
the terms of this covenant, it shall be the duty of such Power to take
immediate steps to procure its release from such obligations.

ARTICLE XXVI

Amendments to this covenant will take effect when ratified by the
States whose representatives compose the Executive Council and by
three-fourths of the States whose representatives compose the body
of delegates.

14 DAY USE

RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED

LOAN DEPT.

This book is due on the last date stamped below o

on the date to which renewed.

Kenewed books are subject to immediate recall

RENEWALS ONLY

■^H-j^

msss

REC

t^iy'HD

let. No, 642-340^

— _!^

^^^^

S^^^MnoH.

Mq~

^EPTr

^^^^^^~

/>;,

NOV 3 0 19^0

LD 21A-10m.l,'68
(H7452sl0)476B

General Library

University of California

Berkeley

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY

Internet Archive Audio

Featured

Top

Images

Featured

Top

Software

Featured

Top

Books

Featured

Top

Video

Featured

Top

Mobile Apps

Browser Extensions

Archive-It Subscription

Save Page Now

Full text of "America and the league of nations; addresses in Europe, Woodrow Wilson"

See other formats