UR disinterestedness is a basic condition of our international policies. It is preposterous for anyone to assert that the United States would make its disinterestedness dependent upon other nations assuming that glorious status. As we never could approve the course assumed by the other nations, we certainly would not stoop to use the possibility of such a course as an argument or threat. The United States consistently told their Allies that they wanted nothing, no new territories, no concessions, but were present as the champions of the various peoples of the world, and not of the vested or commercial interests of any country.

One of the causes of this great war that we have just gone through, is that Germany and Great Britain were competing for the commerce of the world and they found it necessary to exploit peoples in order to secure advantages. We are ready, if I understand the American people correctly, to enter into a free competition, asking no favors and no odds, depending upon the treatment that we give to our customers for the trade that we can secure.

THE ARMENIAN MANDATE

I happen to know a good deal about the question of the Armenian Mandate, because I was slightly instrumental in persuading the President to show his willingness to accept it. On the Thursday before the Saturday that the treaty was signed I had an interview with President Wilson, to argue for the last time, face to face, about my going to Poland at the head of the Polish Mission to investigate the conditions of

that country, and particularly the pogroms that had taken place. I was very reluctant to go. I would not go until I had seen the President. He said to me: "Now, Morgenthau, I've set my heart on your going. I must send a Jew because I want at least one on that Commission to be thoroughly sympathetic to the Jews, and I have hit upon you." "Well," I said, “Mr. President, that is a command and ends all arguments, but I have thirteen minutes left, let's talk about Turkey." And it was then that I suggested to him (this was Thursday) that he ought to persuade the Big Four, of which he was one, to hit upon some one American and send him into Armenia to study the situation, to be a high commissioner representing all these countries and make a report so that the world would know what the real truth

was.

He said to me, "If you will have a paper outlining your plan at my residence by evening, I will see if I can put it through." It was put through on Saturday after the treaty was signed at Versailles. He took the three colleagues into a room and they agreed upon it in principle. I lunched with Mr. Arthur J. Balfour on the following Monday. Sir Maurice Hankey was there and Lord D'Abernon, now British Ambassador to Germany, and I was pleading as hard as I knew how with Balfour, because I had not heard that the measure had been adopted, when Sir Maurice Hankey spoke up and said to Mr. Balfour, "Do you not know that this was passed on Saturday? It is that paper with the little red slip on top of the heap on your desk. That

shows that Lloyd George has agreed to it." He said to us, "That's the way George does it. He never tells me the details." We had a long talk, and Balfour said to me then in the presence of these gentlemen, "If the United States will take a mandate we will yield to them almost any consideration."

We had outlined to the President a system not to undertake a mandate for Armenia alone (I agree that it would be unwise for America to do so) but we had suggested a triple mandate. There was to be a superior or Governor General, with a seat in Constantinople, who was to have special charge of Constantinople and the Dardanelles and there was to be a Governor who was to have charge of all of Anatola and a third to be in charge of Armenia. The Turks and Armenians were to have their respective Parliaments-Anatola a Turkish Parliament, Armenia an Armenian Parliament. There was to be established in Constantinople a great center of liberty radiating its fine influence in every direction. We were going to show the world, particularly the Near East, what American liberty really meant and what real genuine freedom could accomplish.

AMERICA AND THE ARMENIAN
MANDATE

When I visited England I had a long talk with Earl Curzon. He reiterated what Balfour had said, "Please use your influence to have America take a mandate. We want you there and we are willing to accede most anything." I subsequently had the temerity to suggest that they should give us an interest in Gibraltar, because we would not place an American fleet in the Mediterranean Sea and let Great Britain control the door which, if they saw fit to close, would lock in our fleet. When Earl Grey came to this country we again discussed this question. The

Earl said, "How is it that America does not recognize her duty toward the Armenians?" Earl Grey was surprised how little favorable sentiment for an Armenian mandate existed amongst the legislators. We had stirred up through this Near East Relief this tremendous sympathy for the Armenians. We had helped to educate the American people on Armenian conditions. We had reached into every little hamlet, every church and every Sunday School in America. The American people are a better people for having had themselves awakened to a sympathy to carry out the beautiful spirit that the missionaries had developed so magnificently all through the Near East and China, and the American people seemed ready to assume this responsibility. I am not going to elaborate upon how it was prevented. I merely want to tell you that we, the American people, are partly responsible for the massacres that followed in Silesia and elsewhere because we failed to accept a mandate. Colonel Haskell went there representing the four Governments. He notified us how little it would take to control the situation. Major Genl. Harbord who has just been appointed to assist General Pershing, visited that country under orders of President Wilson. Harbord's report shows that he investigated like an engineer, he balanced the things that were in favor against those that were against it, and favored that America should accept a mandate.

This evolution that has been started is going to continue. In a few years from now, you will find amongst its enthusiastic supporters all of those men who at present through lack of international education, or non-appreciation of the needs of the hour, have failed to recognize that it is the duty of the United States to assume the moral leadership of the world,

I

WILL give a little personal history of the feeling which many people in the neighborhood of Hull House had when the League of Nations was first talked about and when they believed, as simple people all over the world believed, that it was going to be the friend and the big brother of the weak scattered over the earth's surface and of those social groups who had not had a chance. Their experience registers something of the bitter disappointment at the moment which has constricted the hearts of many simple people.

For years at Hull House we have had a great deal to do with Italians who had left South Italy for South America to gather in the crops and to perform other hard agricultural labor. They used to have a very naïve way of beginning on the South Side of the equator, to follow the ripening of the crops, as best they might, sometimes up into North Dakota, and then to go home for a few months and begin again. It was a very interesting scheme, and it would have worked very well but for one thing that for so much of the time they were on the ocean, for so much of the time they were in remote parts of South American countries, sometimes in Central Mexico and sometimes even in our own states where they could not easily find an Italian Consul. They seemed to belong to a No Man's Land, where no man seemed to be very much concerned for their rights or their protection.

A Committee of such Italians came to me in the early days of the discussion of the League of Nations, and asked whether or not it was going to do something to take care of what we may call nomadic labor, of the labor which had

so little chance to be fostered by its own nationality and which was exploited, more or less, by all the other nationalities. These Italians felt very grateful to President Taft, because at one time when he was serving as a Federal Judge, in a case having to do with the West Virginia mines, he gave a decision in favor of some emigrants who had taken out their first papers and were therefore, in a sense, wards of the nation. He allowed them compensation for damages which in the steel mills and in the mines had systematically been denied them unless they were citizens of the United States. There was no money paid at that time to a widow or her little children living in Italy if the bread-winner were killed or injured in this country. Because of this decision, the Italians hoped that many things which had to do with nomadic labor might be taken care of when the League of Nations was established, and they were the more hopeful because Mr. Taft advocated it.

ECONOMIC ASPECTS OF LEAGUE

Then there are other aspects of the League of Nations which came very near home to one who had to do with immigrants, many of whom came to this country in search of more protection and more freedom than they were able to find at home. In the minds of some of these people whose daily lives are spent in hard labor there has been a bitter disappointment that the League of Nations in its first activities, and this would apply to the mandatory as it does to other commissions, has been so slow to have anything to do with the economic aspects of life. I am sure

that many people must feel that the nation which ignores the economic resources of a country that is handed over to it under the mandatory provisions for protection and care, in a certain way begs the whole question. It is like being moral according to an old-fashioned test but refusing to measure up to the current test of the moment, to the test which after all determines whether or not one is moral contemporaneously. A nation may be content to apply a standard which was very good when colonial government had to do merely with political relations and had not yet openly acknowledged that it was also dealing with economic relations.

This may be illustrated in the case of Mesopotamia. In the secret treaties France was to have Mesopotamia, but England's troops won Mesopotamia, and England was able to produce a concession signed before the war for the oil interests there; and so when the thing was finally adjudicated, England was given the mandatory over Mesopotamia with seventy-five per cent of the oil, and France had the remainder, twenty-five per cent. The oil was apportioned and the mandate was given, (as all the other allocations, as I understand it, were made) by the Supreme Council and not by the League of Nations. The League of Nations merely undertakes to see that the annual reports are made and other matters carried out which are provided for under the section on mandatories.

But the economic test is at least under discussion. An Englishman has recently described what the result would be if England would say to Mesopotamia, "Of course, this oil must be developed. It belongs to the world; it does not belong to these tribes of Kurds and Arabs who happen to live in this immediate neighborhood.

It is needed for the heat and light and comfort of all the world. We will put our capital into it and pay our capital a good percentage, we will put experts here to develop these oil fields and we will pay our experts well. But after that is done, after all the nations of the earth have had an equal chance to buy this oil, the profits therefrom shall be returned, at least a goodly percentage of them, into the development of Mesopotamia.' Mesopotamia." That would be fair and square, what we call a guardianship, analogous to what would happen to a child who had lost its parents and had been provided with a guardian.

It is the business of such a guardian to make a report to the probate judge. Let us assume that he makes a report on having kept the child in "law and order," that he makes a report on recognizing the child's right to vote and on getting him ready for his vote when he is twenty-one; he makes a report on all sorts of other things but he makes no report on the property which might be supposed to belong to the child. He says, "No, I prefer not to make a report on that." May we not say that there is a similar situation in these mandatory reports to be made to the Secretariat of the League?

I have been guardian of several children during the many years that I have lived at Hull House. Mothers have given them to me at the last desperate moment. Some of these children have been dependent and some of them have been "backward," and most of them have had a little property, usually what comes from an insurance. If there is one thing that is pathetic about these little bereft creatures it is that they are reaching out most eagerly to find some one to take the mother's place. They do not stand aside, but they make an imperious claim, "My mother is dead and you are now to be my mother."

And they bring sometimes their little bags and baggages, after I have made a very careful arrangement to have them live with some aunt or relative, and camp on the door-steps of Hull House saying, "You are my guardian, and, of course, I am going to live with you."

THE MANDATORY SYSTEM

Something of that sort, it seems to me, is the situation implied in the mandatory system. If we admit that there are simple people in the world who are unable to govern themselves, and I think almost everyone dislikes to admit it, then we ought also to say, "Let that nation which is given the right of a mandatory also render some account of the economic resources which are found within the borders of the socalled backward nation.”

Of course, it is a great thing to have publicity on these matters of colonial administrations. Perhaps the first probate court was established without having very much to do with property -although I imagine a lawyer would tell us that it had only to do with property and did not care much about what happened to the child—but certainly publicity was very good for the child's guardian. A great deal is to be gained in that the mandatory nation must report back once a year, and it may be possible that gradually property interests will also be accounted for.

The British Labor Party, in the early months of 1917, when that remarkable cry came out from Russia, "No annexations and no indemnities," said this: "Let the League of Nations take all of the colonies in tropical Africa, not only the German colonies but the Belgian colonies, and the French colonies and the Portuguese colonies. Let them administer them first for the benefit of the people who are there, and let the vegetable oils and other valuable things found there,

be fairly allocated to all the nations of the earth."

The British Labor Party made this point in regard to the natural resources because they knew that these natural resources influenced the situation all of the time; the trader, the concessionaire, the planter and the rest of them continually made it very hard for the national administrators to stand firm in the interest of the backward nation. I think no one would doubt that there has been a splendid civil service administration of the British African colonies, and that, when things went wrong in those colonies-as perhaps it sometimes did as in other colonies-it was under the pressure of men from various nations who came in hoping to make financial gain out of the economic resources which were hidden in tropical Africa.

If the British Labor Party had been able to carry out this scheme, what would have followed? As an Englishman has recently said, there will have to be some sort of civil service training for men who are going to represent the League of Nations, and as such trained men made continuous inquiries into what was happening in this tropical South Africa, which had formerly belonged to at least four different nations, they might make a protest against the conscription of native troops, as they might make a protest against various things which are now happening in certain colonies in South Africa.

Above all they would certainly develop the international mind. They would develop a point of view which had to do, not with the good fortune or good will of one trader or of one nation, but primarily that the resources there should be developed in order to serve all the world; and secondarily, although I should like to put it first, that the people in that region should have every chance for development. Then we