very leaders in the United States who had attacked Wilson most violently because he went slowly into the war were now the men who would employ every possible weapon to anger the British, weaken the President, and postpone the pacification of the world. Yet one need not express surprise. It was human nature, human nature in a rather aggravated form. The groups of the country were not united.1 This dis-unity now expressed itself, because it might do so without appearance of disloyalty. And there was the deepseated party issue. Republican leaders, accustomed to occupy the seats of responsibility, could not, even in a grave crisis, recognize inwardly the fact that they were not in control of affairs.

But the object of the President's return to Washington was to sign the great appropriation bills that were to be passed during the last days of the session of Congress, to hold conference with Cabinet and other officials upon the state of the country, and to seek to apply remedies to things that needed remedies or avert ills that might be averted. What happened? A group of senators who had stood well with the nation for many years, men who had supported Mr. Taft in the stormy days of 1912, and other men who had sung "Onward Christian Soldiers" with Roosevelt in the Progressive convention, now united to thwart the President at every turn. Two years before these same leaders had been outraged at the conduct of Senator La Follette and his "wilful" colleagues because they defeated the war purposes of the country in a spectacular filibuster. Now, three senators, led by Sherman of Illinois, with the consent of Lodge and Johnson, themselves aspirants to the presidency, filibustered to death all the great appropriation bills. The railway administration bill, appropriating more than half a billion dollars, a great

"The "melting pot" had not done its work.

education measure which had the approval of all sections of the country, and the general supplies bill were all alike defeated while the President waited in the capitol to sign the V needed laws and thus keep the wheels of government going in accordance with immemorial custom. This happened in a senate nominally Democratie and friendly. What might not happen when the next Congress assembled? Men denounced Wilson because he had gone away from Washington. Men of influence and power all over the East declared that he had deserted his post of duty. Now, when he had returned and waited to do his duty, three members of the Senate took away every chance of his doing it; and influential men in the industrial centres of the North approved.

Nor had these unexpected events been without effect in Paris and London. The men at the Peace Conference who still wished a peace without the assistance of the United States, save in the capacity of Santa Claus, took a new cue from the American dispatches. Their conversion to the principle of international good will, as indicated in the acceptance of the league of nations idea, had not been very thorough. Wilson knew the changing tone. But he set out once again, as I have already indicated, for Paris, without calling Congress in extra session, there to resume his lone battle for his ideals. In his address before a great audience in New York he showed no signs of the distress under which he laboured. Ex-President Taft generously spoke from the same platform, He, too, urged the adoption of a constitution for a league of nations as the only possible conclusion to the great war. The former president risked much with his party associates who were then on their way home to renew their attacks President and all his works.1

upon

the

The New York Times of March 5, 1919, gives an account of the meeting and the text of Wilson's address.

Wilson said that he would not come back "till it was all over over there," playing upon a popular war song of the day. He urged that it was not a party issue that he was pressing, that the peoples of Europe were in extreme need of peace, that he could not account for the ignorance of world affairs shown by his leading opponents; and he besought men to think of the future, of the ages to come, not the exigencies of the hour. He closed with an optimistic note. He expected that, in spite of all, the conference would rise to its high obligation and set the world upon a better way and that Americans would yet repent their bitter opposition to the league idea. There was ample time to think as the George Washington returned him to the scene of conflict in Paris. Should he yet win a just peace and a promising league of nations?

CHAPTER XV

THE TREATY AND THE LEAGUE

WHEN Wilson returned to Paris a second time, March 13, 1919, he found that under the leadership of Clemenceau the league of nations and the proposed treaty, as agreed upon January 25th and confirmed February 14th, had been separated. The news from Washington greatly influenced the members of the conference. Certainly they endeavoured once more to write a treaty in which enormous indemnities and the Rhine boundary should be secured to France, in which Italy was to have her way in the Adriatic, and Japan was to have the German islands in the northern Pacific and the Chinese province of Shantung. No one talked seriously of a league of nations. Wilson was thought to be a defeated man, even Mr. Arthur J. Balfour and the other British leaders had apparently deserted the President. It was to be a quick agreement now upon a "strong" peace, a resolute attitude toward · Russia, and a prompt return to business as usual. The fourteen points were to be "scrapped," not even the terms of the armistice serving as a restraint.

How foolish, then, must have appeared the talk of the President on the night of his departure from New York! He had said to the Senate leaders and to the country that the league and the treaty should be so interwoven that they could not be disentangled. He had said as much in New

William Allen White, in The Saturday Evening Post, August 16, 1919, "Hearings," Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, 66th Congress, 1st Session, Vol. 2, p. 1231. 'Ray Stannard Baker in Springfield Republican, November 6, 1919.

York in September, 1918. And the conference had agreed on two occasions that this should be done. On the day of his arrival in Paris no one seemed to take him seriously when he talked as if there was still no doubt on the point.

The Euro

peans had not taken the measure of the President. As I have shown already in these pages, European statesmen had never taken him seriously, except when it proved absolutely necessary to gain his support or lose the war.

Wilson was the only eminent man in the world who really thought that the principles on which the United States entered the war were to be incorporated in the terms of the peace. Yet people blamed him for playing a lone hand! But on March 17th he published a statement in the French papers that there must be a league of nations and that it must be an integral part of the treaty. It set all Paris agog. Upon what real power could the President rest any such pretensions as that short announcement assumed? Wilson had at that time three sources of influence in the world: he could refuse, as President of the United States, to accept the treaty when finished; he could cease approving the grants of hundreds of millions of credit to European governments; and he could announce that, in his opinion, the moral forces of the world should not approve the proposed settlement.

But as President the majority of Congress was against him, and to have taken the first course would have challenged the very elements in American life most hostile to him and which had prevailed in the last election. If he took the second course and refused to lend credits, on which American exports were sent abroad, he would have practically laid an embargo upon American trade. For without the support of the United States the credit of both France and Italy, to say nothing of the smaller countries, would have collapsed.