land. Mr. Balfour gladly consented. I heard this statement in September from Col. House himself. At that date, Mr. Balfour had submitted no treaties to Washington, and no further request for them had been made at the British foreign office.

These treaties, of course, were published by Trotski in Petrograd in November of 1917. At that time, I have been informed on the best of authority, the State Department cabled Ambassador Francis to send the texts of the treaties immediately by cable to Washington. Ambassador Francis replied by sending a summary of the treaties, saying the texts themselves were too long to trust to the inadequate cable service from Russia, and that he was sending them by courier. Presumably, then, it was some six weeks after the publication of the secret treaties in Petrograd before President Wilson saw them for the first time, except for the news reports from Russia and the summary from Ambassador Francis. There is no evidence in the course of events that he took due cognizance of them even at this time. He made no effort to effect their revision. With the indubitable knowledge of their existence and terms, he outlined, a month later, his famous 14 points, and continued to draw for America the vision which, in the nature of the facts with which he was then dealing, could not have been attained. It is only fair to assume that he himself was deluded; at all times he promised himself that he would rectify the error when the peace conference came. But history is very hard on such practices; and since men have died and empires have been lost and infinite wrong has been done in pursuit of the illusion, it is difficult to forgive him his peculiar and rather deliberate sin. None are so blind as those who will not see. The peace conference came-and the original error triumphed. The cold fact is that our splendid idealism has been perverted to ignoble and disastrous ends.

It would be easy to multiply against the administration and the State Department instances of failure to collect or to recognize true facts. The process of collecting true facts and acting upon them is wholly foreign to the bureaucratic atmosphere of the present régime. Instead, the method is reversed; a policy is predetermined on the basis of academic theory, and the machinery of the diplomatic service is utilized to collect and forward the facts which will support this predetermined policy, and to eliminate the facts which will oppose it. The President's note of February, 1918, to Japan, was never given to the American people. It flatly opposed Japanese intervention in Siberia, and stated the argument in such a comprehensive fashion that it would have pinned him down to a policy of nonintervention if the people had known of it. It was written without knowledge of the Japanese political situation, without a request having been sent by the State Department to the embassy in Tokyo. for a report on that situation, or without any such report having been submitted by the embassy in Tokyo to the State Department. In other words, it was fired off in the air: and not until several weeks later did the information reach Washington through the press that there was a substantial political opposition in Japan to intervention. in Siberia. It is safe to say that no adequate knowledge or information exists to-day in the State Department of the political situation in Japan.

IGNORANT OF LABOR AIMS.

On February 20-23, 1918, the interallied labor conference was held in London. American labor delegates did not attend. The conference delegated Camille Huysmans and others to go to America and attempt to bring our labor movement into a more liberal frame of mind. The whole issue of President Wilson's liberalism was involved. The delegates at London were the true friends of his 14 principles, the true enemies of the secret treaties. Two weeks after that event the administration had no knowledge of the interallied labor conference. It did not know that Camille Huysmans proposed coming to America. Such events were wholly out of the State Department's sphere. The press news of the conference, of course, was almost entirely cut off by the British censor; but the information finally reached the administration through unofficial channels. To judge by the results, it must have thrown the administration into quite a panic. Huysmans and the interallied labor conference stood for a conference with German delegates. The British Government was asked to stop these men from coming. A hand-picked group of Lloyd-George adherents in British labor circles was immediately dispatched to America. The Gompers mission was immediately dispatched from America to England-at the expense, it is reported, of the British Government-in an effort to split the British Labor Party. It was not until a month after the close of the interallied labor conference. of February that the first labor report of the war was received by the State Department from the American Embassy in London. Thus closely was President Wilson cognizant of and working with his real friends; and thus deliberately did he sustain the hands of his real enemies.

Space does not permit an analysis of the failure of the State Department with respect to the Russian situation; the blame in that quarter, also, lies primarily with the President. This is a story which will receive later treatment; suffice it to say that it is the most terrible and colossal failure of our diplomacy in the war. Because of it, the world is faced with untold misery. Russia is still the key to the whole settlement of the war; and a reversal of our vicious Russian policy, and a return to "open covenants of peace openly arrived at," might yet solve the tragic difficulties of the world.

О

LEAGUE OF NATIONS

LETTERS

OF THE

HON. ELIHU ROOT

RELATIVE TO THE

LEAGUE OF NATIONS

PRESENTED BY MR. LODGE

JUNE 23, 1919.-Ordered to be printed

WASHINGTON

GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE

S D-66-1-vol 13-8