before it since the passage of the War Act of September, 1917. The statute, which proposed to raise $6,000,000,000 in the next fiscal year, was awaiting the signature of the President when he arrived in Boston on February 24. The Victory Liberty Loan of $4,500,000,000 was floated in May to provide funds for the period until the new act should be productive. McAdoo had ceased to be Secretary of the Treasury, his place being taken by Carter Glass, of Virginia, who had played a leading part in the enactment of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913.

In the absence of legislation to give form and program to the period of demobilization, Secretary of Commerce Redfield created in February, 1919, an Industrial Board which proposed to do informally what the war boards had accomplished during active warfare. The experiment was a failure. The patriotic incentive to coöperation was gone. Business now demanded to be let alone; willing to scold the Government for inconveniences it had suffered, it was not ready to make a voluntary sacrifice for the general good. The members of the Industrial Board resigned in a body in May, after their attempt to fix, and lower, the price of steel had been ruled upon by Attorney-General Palmer as probably illegal. The anti-agreement provisions of the trust laws became once more effective with the cessation of hostilities, and the combinations which the government had compelled for military purposes became illegal again.

Congress developed no new leadership to face the problems of peace. The end of Democratic ascendancy was approaching with the expiration of the Sixty-Fifth Congress on March 4, 1919, and there was no spirit for the advocacy of measures that could not pass. The absence of the President in Paris during most of the session further demoralized the departing majority. For six years Wilson's leadership had been coercive or persuasive at every point, and with each success in his program there had been a tendency to make the next measure more completely his. In his absence his party associates could not feel his impressive leadership; his Cabinet found itself without a head

and working at cross-purposes, while the Republican minority promised great and practical things for the future and watched with complacency every event that revealed the inconvenience of doing business without the President or that could plausibly be ascribed to his or his party's shortcomings.

in Washing

ton

The return of Wilson to Washington in February was necessary in order to wind up the affairs of the session, but produced no change in the course of administra- Wilson back tion. He was greeted with open defiance by Republican members of the Senate, who were to sit in the next session as part of the majority. These had opened a debate on the League of Nations while he was on the ocean, and at the close of the session thirty-seven of them, more than enough to defeat any treaty, signed a manifesto declaring their unwillingness to vote for the covenant that he brought from Paris. Unshaken by their opposition, and heartened by the open support of Taft and many other Republicans, Wilson performed his necessary tasks in Washington and on March 5 set sail again for Paris to complete his work at the Peace Conference.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

William E. Dodd, Woodrow Wilson and His Work (1920), is a critical and appreciative biography by a Virginia historian, and is probably as reliable as can be written until the confidential files are opened. George Creel, The War, the World, and Wilson (1920), is a panegyric, but by a war worker who was in a position to know many facts. Ray Stannard Baker, What Wilson Did at Paris (1919), is by the chief of the American press bureau at Paris during the treaty deliberations. Robert Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, a Personal Narrative (1921), is the earliest account published by one of the principal negotiators. J. M. Keynes, Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), is a violent attack upon the treaty, supported by a mass of statistical material accumulated by the writer during his service with the British delegation, it should be checked by Bernard M. Baruch, The Making of the Reparation and Economic Sections of the Treaty (1920), and C. H. Haskins and R. H. Lord, Some Problems of the Peace Conference (1920). Edward J Dillon, The Inside Story of the Peace Conference (1920), contains less confidential material than its title suggests. A tract much used by opponents of the treaty is W. C. Bullitt, The Bullitt Mission to Russia. Testimony before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, of W. C. Bullitt (1919).

The un

settled world

CHAPTER LVI

RECONSTRUCTION

THE word "reconstruction" was a misnomer in 1919 as it had been in 1865. In the period following the Civil War its use makes it easy to obscure the fact that the South underwent an economic and social revolution while in the North the rural basis of society gave way to industrial. The plans then made and the statutes passed with reconstruction in view failed to effect it, and society proceeded to readjust itself to changed conditions in spite of the advice of its political guardians. In 1919 the world was full of talk of reconstruction, and in many countries programs were evolved fitting each individual and every group into a prearranged niche in a more or less logical structure. The diplomats at Paris manipulated the boundaries and balance of international powers; parliaments tried to house their people and to put the citizen to work where he belonged; party leaders promulgated doctrines with as much assurance as though their followers accepted them. But the tired world was no longer plastic. Russia was in evolutionary revolt and not able or willing to respect the usages of nations. The "backward nations" were everywhere restive at the control they had to endure. Germany was beaten to the ground, but only the blind could think of keeping her there forever. The working classes among the Allies, conscious that their effort made victory possible, were enjoying the economic improvement that had come to them through the accident of war, and were determined to increase rather than diminish their future share in the output of the world. Unsettlement, national and international, contained its unrevealed promise of evolution, while hold-over leaders of the pre-war age professed to reconstruct society.

President Wilson arrived back in Paris on March 14,

1919, with the ominous threat of the Senate leaders to wreck the treaty ringing in his ears; with his Wilson in opponents spurred on by his defiance, that Paris again "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"; and with the knowledge that his ranking adviser, Secretary of State Lansing, was in thorough disapproval of both the protracted negotiations, and the nature of the projected league. During his absence, he found, the other American delegates had consented to shelve the League in the interest of immediate peace. He learned as well that France was unwilling to accept the League as sufficient guarantee along the Rhine frontier, and that Italy was unwilling to sign the German peace until assured that her own claims to territory along the Adriatic would be protected. Secret treaties signed in the darkest period of the war were openly brought forth pledging the Allies to support Italy against Austria and Jugo-Slavia, and Japan as conqueror of and successor to German rights in China. America was no party to these, but their European signers brought into danger the doctrines of self-determination and open covenants. Germany was threatened with annihilation through the medium of reparations that were in effect punitive indemnities, and unbearable at that. The freedom of the seas was not even discussed. Equality of nations had been forgotten. And the peace that was to end wars because of its essential moderation and justice was fading away. There was even fair question whether the associates could be brought to agree to any peace at all.

The burden and complexity of the negotiations hastened the concentration of power in the Peace Conference in the hands of Wilson, Clemenceau, and Lloyd George, with Orlando generally a fourth. Every attack was focused upon Wilson, since he alone, by conviction, stood agamst a peace of barter and balance of power, and struggled to rescue some of the liberalism that had made the last year of war look like

the dawning of a new age of international fair play. Early in April the ravage of influenza, that had washed over the world in the winter of 1918-19, laid him prostrate; and the conferences of the "Big Four" in his Paris residence were held with him in the adjacent sick-room. He had planned a one-man task, and what he could not himself accomplish no one could do for him. He met the critics of the covenant by obtaining a recognition of the Monroe Doctrine, and prevented the inclusion of the racial equality demanded by Japan. The latter victory was paid for by his reluctant acceptance of Japan as the inheritor of Germany in Shantung; with the result that China felt herself betrayed and every weaker nation lost confidence in the fairness of the peace.

Conference

What Wilson saved of his liberal program he saved by compromise or threat. On April 6 he ordered the George Compromises Washington to Brest, and by this intimation of of the Peace his willingness to abandon the Peace Conference held his associates to their work. He refused to assent to the binding force of the secret Italian treaty of 1915; but was induced to agree to a compromise whereby France was enabled to secure the mineral output of the Saar Valley whose population was almost entirely German. The treaty as it was submitted to the fourth plenary session of the Peace Conference on April 28 was the best treaty that the five Great Powers could be induced to sign unanimously, but departed far from the altruism of the "fourteen points." It contained as its most promising feature, so far as the peace of the world was concerned, a revised covenant for the League of Nations. In this organization, working through the council of nine— the five Great Powers and Belgium, Brazil, Greece, and Spain-it would be possible to negotiate the undoing of the worst features of the treaty itself, as passions should subside with the passing of the years.

The treaty was handed to the German delegates on May 7, by Clemenceau, who recalled the last occasion when German and French envoys had met in the palace at Versailles. For him the treaty was the victory of his philosophy