Mr. Taft and other defenders of the league have claimed we would not lose our sovereignty if we joined the league, because such decisions have to be unanimous in order to be binding, and that we could vote against anything that might injure our rights of defense. Question: Have these defenders read the covenant?

Proposed correction. (a) All disputes of international character should be referred to arbitration before a court established by delegates to the assembly; (b) the council should have no power to decide disputes involving war.

Article 16. This article provides for punishments. A State which goes to war in disregard of the covenant is "ipso facto deemed to have committed an act of war against all other members." And it is to be punished not only by war but starvation. A member of the league may be expelled by vote of the council for violating the cove

nant.

Proposed corrections. (a) The assembly only should have power to say when a member has disregarded the covenant; (b) short of cases where war exists a member should not be cut off from trade relations with nonmember nations.

Article 17. This article extends a gold brick to nonmember States by inviting them, in case they have controversies among themselves, to accept settlement at the hands of the league under articles 12 to 16, but "with such modifications as may be deemed necessary by the council."

Proposed correction. The words quoted above should be omitted. It is offering nothing to offer to decide a dispute under rules subject to undisclosed modifications.

Article 22. This article provides for "mandatories" for backward peoples, lately belonging to the enemy, to be exercised until they can "stand alone." By the peace treaty some twelve to fifteen millions of natives, occupying over a million square miles of territory in Asia and Africa, are shifted from one sovereignty to another, irrespective of their right of self-determination. If the mandatory principle is good for these backward peoples lately the property of the enemy, it should also be good for backward peoples which have not changed hands, and these should also have a promise of independence when they can stand alone.

Article 23. This article contains the labor program of the covenant. It consists of seven and a half lines of an ordinary newspaper column. The league "will endeavor to secure and maintain fair and humane conditions of labor for men, women, and children" in all countries, whether league members or not. That is it. That is the big five's vision of labor and reconstruction problems in 1919 (not 1814).

Proposed correction. The league should have a real labor and reconstruction program. But there was no representative of labor among the delegates at the Paris conference.

Article 26. The covenant can not be amended except by unanimous vote of the council. This means that any one of the five diplomats (appointed by governments, not elected by peoples) can block all reform. This gives an unscrupulous member of the council an enormous trading power in case others want reforms.

Proposed correction. The covenant should be amended by twothirds vote of the assembly.

Annex to covenant. All the enemy countries, plus Russia and Mexico, are excluded. They should not be, if the league is a peace league and if its object is to promote democracy.

It is the writer's opinion that an international agreement to submit the question of war to popular referendum would do much more to stop war than any league. But, if we must have a league, it should avoid placing all the conservative nations among the sheep and the radical ones among the goats. The present covenant makes this mistake. In fact, it pointedly divides the nations which have declared war on old-fashioned privilege from those which have not yet done so. It is the old order against the new; whether the new order can be fought by segregating it, is a question which the gentlemen who drafted the covenant no doubt pondered deeply. To my mind, segregating the new order is but another name for integrating it and giving its advocates a mighty good reason for hanging together.

But the very fact that the covenant was drafted as it was, whether ever adopted or not, has done much to clarify issues; and to show that in the ally countries, including the United States, the people who believe in democracy must hereafter dominate the government, if they are to escape another World War. For this we can be grateful, even though in a league of nations such as covenant provides democracy would be head down in a bootleg.

[From the Nation, May 17, 1919.]

WHY WILSON WAS DEFEATED AT PARIS.

By LINCOLN COLCORD.

The progress of events is now rapidly showing us how far astray from sense and reason we have wandered during the World War and how little we actually have learned. Things are being told us to-day which, although they were sufficiently known at the time of their happening, could not have been spoken of publicly under all the bans and penalties of an autocratic bureaucracy and a docile public opinion; and their publication now causes hardly a ripple of interest. We are at last permitted to read, for instance, from the pen of no less a patriot than Mrs. Humphry Ward the full story of the great French mutiny of 1917, when regiments of French soldiers before Verdun shot their officers and started to go home. We are permitted to read, from the pen of one of the ablest American correspondents in Paris the story of how Clemenceau in 1918 threatened to make a separate peace with Germany unless the command were unified and Foch were appointed generalissimo of all the allied and American forces. In fact, the press for several months has been full and running over with the "cold" political news of the past few years news which once might have precipitated revolutions, but which falls to-day without comment and apparently without public comprehension of its significance. There was a sense in which the American public throughout the war knew less than nothing of the true state of European politics and society; for to know a mask is less than to know the man. Perhaps we had scant groundwork for a perspicacious knowledge either in interest or in educa

tion. Perhaps we were determined to idealize the war. The cue for idealism had beer given from Washington; or, to bring the figure down to the terms of modern dramatics, we had been told to "register" idealism. But the war nevertheless took our hearts far afield and opened our eyes wider in the direction of Europe than they had for a long time been opened toward foreign lands. Yet the net result of our mal-education under the tutelage of an irrational censor and the direction of a narrow Bourbonism was the creation of an ignorance so vast and an emotionalism so overwhelming as well-nigh to defeat the original purpose and integrity of the enterprise. In short, we almost wholly lost our point of view; and when we had helped to win the war for idealism we were unable to perceive that idealism quite unaccountably had been somewhere left in the lurch. Even to-day we are looking squint-eyed at Paris, failing to recognize truth and falsehood when we see them.

But if the American public has remained in ignorance of the real trend and significance of affairs abroad, what of our Government, what of that bureaucracy which has elected to keep the people in ignorance? Has the administration actually been better informed? To the man in the street the question sounds absurd. He thinks at once of the impressive name of the State Department, of the sacred mysteries of government; and all his conceptions of public men and affairs are unconsciously exaggerated by the medium through which he knows of them-by the constant repetition of names in the newspapers, and by the artificial value which publicity gives to all events. He has a perfectly wholesome feeling that the Government must know the facts. To those who have had a glimpse behind the curtain, however, and especially to the Washington newspaper correspondent, there remains neither mystery nor illusion. He beholds the Government as a piece of unbelievably inefficient machinery and the administration as a group of very ordinary men. He learns to accept incredible facts and to attribute ordinary failings to these men. In short, he learns the simple truth, without glamor or eva

sion.

From such a post of vantage (and of despair) I have often wondered, during the past two years, what the effect would be upon public opinion if a majority, or even an influential minority, of the American people could realize the actual conditions under which the foreign policies of the country were determined. What would happen, for instance, if they could credit, know, and understand that the Government probably was more ignorant of politics and affairs abroad than many a private individual or organization; that the State Department was organized virtually to withhold true information, in the sense that it was committed to a presentation only of the acceptable bureaucratic point of view; that the claim of "secret and confidential information" in which every official, from the President down, took refuge when hard pressed, was frequently nothing but specious humbug; that while baskets full of secret and confidential information unquestionably poured in upon the State Department, practically none of it bore on the more vital forces and issues that were moving in the world; that a great deal of authentic information from abroad was not permitted to enter the doors of the State Department at all; that the small residue of true report which

found lodgment there was, in the nature of the bureaucratic atmosphere, self-discredited and rarely considered; and that the whole effort of the administration to maintain an authority over opinion and to keep the public in ignorance of true facts was largely inspired, either deliberately or unconsciously, by the desire of the bureaucracy to cover up its inadequacy and inefficiency, and to have its own way without the bother of a formidable opposition.

IDEALS LOST TO SECRET TREATIES.

These are serious allegations, but to any candid mind the general proof of them is written plain on the face of daily affairs. We went into the war on the argument of the President, to fight for ideals and for a democratic peace. We have helped materially to win the war. Neither ideals nor a democratic peace have been the resultant. On the promise of the President, we did not go into the war to fight for the secret treaties of the Allies or for any imperialistic aims. All of the secret treaties and many imperialistic aims are written into the peace which we have helped to win and are prepared to sign. These secret treaties were in existence when we entered the war. We were fighting for them all along, it seems. If the President knew of them, it was his duty to insist upon their abrogation. No less a demand could have squared his acts with his professions. If he did not know of them, it was his duty to find out about them. No sane man would lead a country into a blind fight. As a matter of fact, he did know of them, in the sense that all the world knew of them; yet he did not permit himself to know of them officially; he would not consider them seriously; he persisted in the belief that he would be able single-handed to offset them at the peace conference. It should have been obvious, however, that if these secret treaties were not revised at sometime prior to the conference, they would be written into the peace treaty; and that to carry America forward. in the war on the issues of democracy and idealism while the treaties remained in existence was an act devoid of both wisdom and sincerity.

A few weeks ago, on the front page of one of our most important. newspapers, we read how President Wilson in Paris learned for the first time in Paris of the secret treaties between Japan and the Entente Allies. The dispatch runs:

It was an awkward moment. Mr. Lloyd-George turned to Baron Makino, whereupon Mr. Wilson was informed that Japan had received the promise of England, France, Italy, and Russia, two years before, that she should have outright all the German islands north of the equator, and that she had agreed that Australia should have all to the south. It was common knowledge that such a distribution had long been contemplated, but nobody outside the foreign offices of the Governments directly involved knew that there were definite, signed agreements concerning the deal.

After learning so much, Mr. Wilson asked if there were any other secret agreements which had not been produced at the conference. It was then admitted that the agreement with Japan also included the British, French, and Italian promises to support her claims to the Chinese Province of Shantung as the price Japan demanded for allowing China to enter the war, despite the fact that China had repeatedly been trying to get into the war against Germany of her own volition.

The dispatch goes on to give the texts of these treaties, entered into by Great Britain under date of February 16, 1917, and by France on

March 1, 1917. Why did not Mr. Wilson know of these treaties long before? Why was his diplomatic conduct not such as to require their production before we had helped to drive the war through to victory? This is no captious criticism. Thousands of American boys have died in the war-not, we had understood, for the maintenance of secret treaties known only in the foreign offices of the Government directly involved. Yet these secret treaties are what we have won. The Allies gauged the President accurately. "It was an awkward moment"--but he finally supported them. No wonder George Lansbury, one of the firmest friends of President Wilson's 14 points, says in the London Daily Herald, commenting on the peace treaty:

There is no honor left for any of us. The league of nations is a body without soul. President Wilson has been beaten. He forced public acceptance of his ideals on the other powers, but they have beaten him secretly. He compromised on essentials, and therefore the details have gone astray. From the moment he abandoned the first of the 14 points he abandoned them all.

WILSON STARTS TOO LATE.

Indeed, it was far too late at the peace conference for President Wilson to kick over the traces and demand a revision of the allied imperialistic war aims. He should have done it at the beginning of our participation in the war. But throughout the spring and summer of 1917 the President, as all his friends admitted, was so deeply immersed in academic projects for the prosecution of the war that he forgot his primary function as director of the country's foreign policies. Unfortunately, it was an important summer, perhaps the critical summer of the war-the summer of the first Russian revolution, of the Stockholm conference, and of the Reichstag resolutions. To these vital manifestations, with all that they entailed, the President gave only a perfunctory consideration; he was busy at home with the war. The allied missions, too, were visiting us that summer. Mr. Balfour came first, and was a powerful influence upon the President's policies. Then came Maréchal Joffre and M. Viviani; then the Italians. The country sentimentalized the visitors, and, through them, the war. The President liked it; it helped him to evade problems and escape the results of inefficiency in his administration. He encouraged the sentiment. Plainly, it was no time, from his point of view, to be talking of the allied imperialistic war aims or to be demanding the revision of secret treaties. Yet the processes of time, truth, and history are inexorable. It happened to be the only time when the desired result could have been accomplished. Failing that opportunity, it was written into the future that the fruits of the first Russian revolution would be lost, and that the secret treaties of the 'Allies would be maintained at the peace conference when it came. Thereafter, America was committed to support of, and actually was fighting for, the imperialistic aims (not for herself, but for the Allies), to which she has now set her hand.

Did President Wilson, in the summer of 1917, know about the secret treaties of the Allies? Beyond question, he did. When Mr. Balfour was in America in the early part of that summer, Col. House requested him, on the score that we were now in the war, and that President Wilson ought to see what we were fighting for, to send copies of all the secret treaties to Washington on his return to Eng