non-Polish territory. Ancient Poland was to be re-erected and the maintenance of the peace of the Baltic region was to be her peculiar mission. Clemenceau, like the leaders of France in the seventeenth century, thought that a good scheme to keep Germany busy on that frontier. Here again was a problem and a solution that would have been but the beginning of another war. If Italy was to be the mistress of the new Balkan ensemble and Poland the manager of a similar tragedy on the frontiers of old Russia what were the beneficial results of the war? Simply the absence of German imperialism?

Really, the commissions of the conference which set about remaking the map of Europe while Wilson worked upon the league constitution were not making the headway that simple, old-fashioned diplomats had expected. There was no other way but that of the "simple Mr. Wilson" as Clemenceau was wont to say. It was therefore agreed with some misgivings that there should be a league, that the league should be a part of the treaty itself, and the first outline of its principal clauses was formally proclaimed to the world.1 Thus the complex and pressing difficulties of prostrate Europe were to be put in a way of settlement. British Liberals and the American President were about to find a way forward, in spite of the handicaps. As Wilson took ship for Washington to sign a score of bills that required his presence and to persuade a recalcitrant congress that the world expected great things of it, Europe experienced a second warming to the "impracticable man from America."

But as the European statesmen began to settle down to ac ceptance of the Wilson ideal, at least in a measure, the wish on their part to have the United States assume the greater

William Allen White gives a good account of this part of the negotiations in The Saturday Evening Post, August 16, 1919.

part of the allied debt incurred in the war against Germany took rather definite form. If there was to be a world league and victorious nations were to be denied the spoils of war, then the league should take over the international debt, the United States bearing a disproportionate part because of her immense riches and her late entrance into the struggle. Wilson might have his league and a new world order might be set up, if the United States would consent to this.1

It was not a wholly unreasonable proposition. It showed, moreover, that European statesmen had read American history. The new world-state, if it were to be set up as Wilson and his liberal-radical friends wished, should, like the Federal Government of 1789, take over the debt which had been incurred in preparing the way for it. The amazing point was that sensible men, who knew the United States, should supL pose that Wilson could bring about the adoption of such a plan in a single state of the American Union. Wilson's victory, as he was about to set out for America, threatened to be too complete. Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Orlando, if they were to enter a new world federation, would go all the way and ask the President to go with them.

Wilson returned by way of Boston and there gave voice to his zeal and enthusiasm for the league. The outlook seemed good. But he was only running into a new hornets' nest. The success of his league with British approval only gave the million or more of Germans and German sympathizers in the United States an issue. They could not denounce the armistice. They could not oppose the President as such

1A personal letter of January 8, 1919, from one of the American commissioners reads: "It is common to hear that the United States should not only cancel the Allies debts, but that we should go back to August 1, 1914, and share the debts that England, France, and Italy have piled up in order to defeat Germany. The suggestions go even further in that they ask that the debts be apportioned according to the resources of each nation and that an allowance should be made for the loss of man power."

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without risk. They could attack any specific idea, the more if it forced a secondary rôle upon Germany. Germans who had shouted for Wilson as he talked in France and in England about the new day, the day of peoples as against governments, now turned overnight from enthusiastic supporters to violent opponents.1

The fact that British statesmen favoured the league and the additional fact that Wilson had not of his own strength ordered the demolition of the Grand Fleet, and thereby violated the terms of the armistice was argument enough for another million Irishmen to desert the President whom most of them had voted for in 1916. Whatever England favoured was to be opposed by Irish leaders and Irish churchmen of high rank. A great congress of Irish societies was arranged to meet in Philadelphia, in Independence Hall, while Wilson was in Washington. It was intended to endorse Irish independence and then a delegation was to be sent to warn the President against his course. What a world we live in! The Germans had defeated the campaign of Mr. Hughes by shouting and voting for him. The Irish had done much to elect Mr. Wilson by the same course. Now both Germans and Irish proposed to defeat any league of nations and any settlement of Europe that left British power and British prestige unbroken. With whom might Wilson work out a solution? Clemenceau? That could not be. With the new German leaders? No American chieftain could endure the odium of such an alliance. With English statesmen? Then he must lose a large part of the strength the last election had left him!

With all this plainly before him in every newspaper, the President went on to Washington. There he met a group of the leaders of Congress. They proved intractable, irreconcil

'Any examination of the German papers will show this. The author knows a score of people who made the sudden change.

able. Senator Lodge talked Irish. Senator Johnson talked Irish. Penrose of Pennsylvania supported Lodge and Johnson, two strange bedfellows. Democrats were bothered about the Irish. A cabinet officer was reported to have said that he dared not make a speech in a northern city. It was the Irish. The great Irish meeting in Philadelphia, blessed by a cardinal and approved by archbishops, held high language, passed resolutions for Irish independence1 and appointed a delegation, led by a former Democratic governor, by an Irish labour spokesman, and by a justice of a state supreme court who had trod very near the edge of treason to the United States at a critical moment of the war. While Wilson argued in the White House with senators and representatives on behalf of the league of nations, these influential delegates of a great segment of the American nation asked a hearing. They were refused. They showed an angry temper and almost demanded a hearing. It was granted them in New York the evening before the President sailed the second time for Paris, the evening of March 4th.

Justice Cohalan, Wilson would not see. But two of the delegates of the Irish Americans followed the President to Paris, obtained permission to visit Ireland, there fraternized with the extremists of the Sinn Fein party, made speeches and protests until the British Liberals lost all patience and the British Government refused to hear the returning Americans when they reached Paris a second time. They did see the President a second time, learned from him what any one must have known already, that the Irish cause was more hopeless then than it had been at any time since the war closed. How could Wilson intercede for the Irish when the Irish made their case the only case in the world, when their leaders proposed to compel the world to wait upon them,

As the Caecho-Slovaks had done July 9, 1918; see ante, p. 278.

and even to precipitate another war if they did not get exactly what they asked, including the subjection of Protestant Ulster to the will of Catholic Ireland? In the midst of this stirring excitement, the Senate of the United States showed the metal of which its members were made by the adoption of a resolution calling upon the President to press the cause of Ireland before the Peace Conference. John Sharp Williams was the only senator who had the independence to oppose this unprecedented attempt of that body to queer the relations of the country with the most friendly nation in the world.

These are some of the complications that Wilson found in his own country when he submitted the first draft of the league of nations. It was, as I have said, a document of the greatest simplicity. It outlined in general, rather than in specific, terms the plan of future international coöperation. It did not mention the Monroe Doctrine. It omitted all reference to the Japanese demand for racial equality. Immediately the leaders of the Senate demanded the incorporation of a statement specially excepting the Monroe Doctrine from any jurisdiction or even discussion in the proposed league assembly or council. They asked, further, that the United States should be granted leave to withdraw from the league upon the giving of notice. And Senator Knox, formerly Secretary of State in the Taft Administration, began his onslaughts upon the league as an agency of future wars, as a plan for the abandonment of every sovereign power of the United States and the wilful flaunting of all the sacred teachings of Washington. Mr. Taft was so impressed by the vigour of the opposition that he cabled the President at the critical moment urging him to acquiesce in certain proposed amendments.1

It was the United States that now came to the fore and the New York Times, April 2, 1919.