President Wilson's success in securing approval for the League as the basis of the Peace Treaty was his greatest triumph at Paris; and it was accentuated by the acceptance of certain of the amendments that were demanded in America, while those which the French and Japanese insisted upon were discarded or postponed. In comparison with this success, he doubtless regarded his concessions in the matter of reparations and the special Franco-British-American alliance as mere details. His task, however, was by no means completed, since Italian and Japanese claims threatened to bring on crises of almost equal danger.

From the early days of the Conference there had been interested speculation in the corridors of the Quai d'Orsay as to whether the promises made to Italy by the Entente Powers in 1915, which were incorporated in the secret Treaty of London, would be carried into effect by the final peace settlement. That treaty had been conceived in the spirit of old-time diplomacy and had assigned to Italy districts which disinterested experts declared could not be hers except upon the principle of the spoils to the strong. Much of the territories promised in the Tyrol, along the Julian Alps, and on the Adriatic coast was inhabited entirely by non-Italians, whose political and economic fortunes were bound up with states other than Italy; justice and wisdom alike seemed to dictate a refusal of Italian claims. The annexation of such districts by Italy, the experts agreed, would contravene directly the right of self-determination and might lead to serious difficulties in the future. Would the President sanction the application of treaties consummated without the knowledge of the United States and in defiance of the principles upon which he had declared that peace must be made? The application of the Treaty of London, furthermore, would be at the expense, chiefly, of the Jugoslavs, that is, a small nation. The Allies, as well as Wilson, had declared that the war had been waged and that the peace must be drafted in defense of the rights of smaller nationalities. Justice for the weak as for the strong was the basis of the new international order which Wilson was striving to inaugurate.

Had the struggle been simply over the validity of the Treaty of London, Wilson's position would have been difficult enough, for the Premiers of France and Great Britain had declared that they could do nothing else but honor the pledges given in 1915. But Italian opinion had been steadily aroused by a chauvinist press campaign to demand not merely the application of the Treaty of London but the annexation of Fiume, which the treaty assigned to the Jugoslavs. To this demand both the British and French were opposed, although they permitted Wilson to assume the burden of denying Italian claims to Fiume. As time went on, Orlando and Sonnino pressed for a decision, even threatening that unless their demands were satisfied, Italy would have nothing to do with the German treaty. Finally, on the 23d of April, the crisis came to a head. On that day the President published a statement setting forth the American position, which he felt had been entirely misrepresented by a propagandist press. Emphasizing the fact that Italian claims were inconsistent with the principles upon which all the Allies had agreed, as necessary to the future tranquillity of the world, he appealed directly to the Italian people to join with the United States in the application of those principles, even at the sacrifice of what seemed their own interest.

The appeal was based upon sound facts. Its statements were approved publicly by allied experts who knew the situation, and privately by Clemenceau and Lloyd George. It had been discussed in the Council of Four and by no means took Orlando by surprise. But it gave Orlando an opportunity for carrying out his threat of retiring from the Conference. Insisting that Wilson had appealed to the Italian people over his head and that they must choose between him and the President, he set forth at once for Rome, followed by the other Italian commissioners, although the economic experts remained at Paris. Orlando was playing a difficult game. He was hailed in Rome as the defender of the sacred rights of Italy, but in Paris he lacked partners. Both the British and French agreed with Wilson that Italy ought not to have Fiume. They secretly regretted the promises of the London Treaty, although they were prepared to keep their word, and they were by no means inclined to make further concessions in order to bring Orlando and his colleagues back. After a few days of hesitation, they decided to go on with the German treaty and to warn the Italians that, if they persisted in absenting themselves from the Conference, their withdrawal would be regarded as a breach of the Treaty of London which stipulated a common peace with the enemy. They also decided that Italy could not expect to share in German reparations if her delegates were not present to sign the German treaty. Such arguments could not fail to weigh heavily with the Italian delegates, even at the moment when the Italian press and people were giving them enthusiastic encouragement to persist in their uncompromising course. On the 5th of May Orlando left Rome to resume his place in the Peace Conference.

In the meantime the Japanese had taken advantage of the embarrassment caused by the Italian withdrawal, to put forward their special claims in the Far East. During the early days of the Conference they had played a cautious game, as we have seen, attending meetings but taking no decided stand upon European matters. They had even refused to press to the limit the amendment to the League Covenant which enunciated their favorite principle of the equality of races. But now they insisted that on one point, at least, Japanese claims must be listened to; their right of inheritance to the German lease of Kiau-Chau and economic privileges in the Shantung peninsula must receive recognition. This claim had long been approved secretly by the British and French; it had even been accepted by the Chinese at the time when Japan had forced the twenty-one demands upon her. It was disapproved, however, by the American experts in Paris, and Wilson argued strongly for more generous treatment of China. His strategic position, one must admit, was not nearly so strong as in the Fiume controversy. In the latter he was supported, at least covertly, by France and England, whose treaty with Italy explicitly denied her claim to Fiume. The Japanese threat of withdrawal from the Conference, if their claims were not satisfied, carried more real danger with it than that of the Italians; if the Japanese delegates actually departed making the second of the big five to go, the risk of a complete dÉbÂcle was by no means slight. Even assuming that justice demanded as strong a stand for the Chinese as Wilson had taken for the Jugoslavs, the practical importance of the Shantung question in Europe was of much less significance. The eyes of every small nation of Europe were upon Fiume, which was regarded as the touchstone of Allied professions of justice. If the Allied leaders permitted Italy to take Fiume, the small nations would scoff at all further professions of idealism; they would take no further interest either in the Conference or its League. Whereas, on the other hand, the small nationalities of Europe knew and cared little about the justice of Chinese pleas.

Such considerations may have been in the mind of the President when he decided to yield to Japan. The decision throws interesting light upon his character; he is less the obstinate doctrinaire, more the practical politician than has sometimes been supposed. The pure idealist would have remained consistent in the crisis, refused to do an injustice in the Far East as he had refused in the settlement of the Adriatic, and would have taken the risk of breaking up the Conference and destroying all chance of the League of Nations. Instead, Wilson yielded to practical considerations of the moment. The best that he could secure was the promise of the Japanese to retire from the peninsula, a promise the fulfillment of which obviously depended upon the outcome of the struggle between liberal and conservative forces in Japan, and which accordingly remained uncertain. He was willing to do what he admitted was an injustice, in order to assure what seemed to him the larger and the more certain justice that would follow the establishment of the League of Nations.

The settlement of the Shantung problem removed the last great difficulty in completing the treaty with Germany, and on the 7th of May the German delegates appeared to receive it. Nearly eight weeks of uncertainty followed, taken up with the study of German protests, the construction of the treaty with Austria, and finally the last crisis that preceded the signature. The terms were drastic and the German Government, in the persons of Scheidemann, the Premier, and Brockdorff-Rantzau, Minister for Foreign Affairs, seemed determined that, helpless as she was, Germany should not accept them without radical modifications. Their protests touched chiefly upon the economic clauses and reparations, the solution of the Saar problem, the cession of so much German territory to Poland, and the exclusion of Germany from the League of Nations. Ample opportunity was given their delegates to formulate protests, which, although they rarely introduced new facts or arguments that had not been discussed, were carefully studied by Allied experts. Week after week passed. In certain quarters among the Allies appeared a tendency to make decided concessions in order to win the consent of the German delegates. No one wanted to carry out an invasion of the defeated country, and there was no guarantee that a military invasion would secure acquiescence. Germany's strength was in sitting still, and she might thus indefinitely postpone the peace. Was it not the wise course, one heard whispered in Paris, to sugar the bitterness of the treaty and thus win Germany's immediate signature?

Early in June, Lloyd George, evidently under pressure from his Cabinet, declared himself for a decided "softening" of the peace terms in order to secure the acceptance of the enemy. What would Wilson do? He had been anathematized at home and abroad as pro-German and desirous of saving Germany from the consequences of her misdeeds; here was his chance. Would he join with the British in tearing up this treaty, which after four months of concentrated effort had just been completed, in order to secure the soft peace that he was supposed to advocate? His attitude in this contingency showed his ability to preserve an even balance. In the meeting of the American delegation that was called to consider the British proposal, he pronounced himself as strongly in favor of any changes that would ensure more complete justice. If the British and French would consent to a definite and moderate sum of reparations (a consent which he knew was out of the question) he would gladly agree. But he would not agree to any concessions to Germany that were not based upon justice, but merely upon the desire to secure her signature. He was not in favor of any softening which would mar the justice of the settlement as drafted. "We did not come over," he said, "simply to get any sort of peace treaty signed. We came over to do justice. I believe, even, that a hard peace is a good thing for Germany herself, in order that she may know what an unjust war means. We must not forget what our soldiers fought for, even if it means that we may have to fight again." Wilson's stand for the treaty as drafted proved decisive. Certain modifications in details were made, but the hasty and unwise enthusiasm of Lloyd George for scrapping entire sections was not approved. The Conference could hardly have survived wholesale concessions to Germany: to prolong the crisis would have been a disastrous confession of incompetence. For what confidence could have been placed in statesmen who were so patently unable to make and keep their minds?Still the German Government held firm and refused to sign. Foch inspected the Allied troops on the Rhine and Pershing renounced his trip to England, in order to be ready for the invasion that had been ordered if the time limit elapsed without signature. Only at the last moment did the courage of the Germans fail. A change of ministry brought into power men who were willing to accept the inevitable humiliation. On the 20th of June, the guns and sirens of Paris announced Germany's acceptance of the peace terms and their promise to sign, and, surprising fact, a vast crowd gathered on the Place de la Concorde to cheer Wilson; despite his loss of popularity and the antagonism which he had aroused by his opposition to national aspirations of one sort or another, he was still the man whose name stood as symbol for peace.

Eight days later in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, where forty-eight years before had been born the German Empire, the delegates of the Allied states gathered to celebrate the obsequies of that Empire. It was no peace of reconciliation, this treaty between the new German Republic and the victorious Allies. The hatred and distrust inspired by five years of war were not so soon to be liquidated. As the German delegates, awkward and rather defiant in their long black frock coats, marched to the table to affix their signatures, they were obviously, in the eyes of the Allied delegates and the hundreds of spectators, always "the enemy." The place of the Chinese at the treaty table was empty; for them it was no peace of justice that gave Shantung to the Japanese, and they would not sign. The South African delegate, General Smuts, could not sign without explaining the balance of considerations which led him to sanction an international document containing so many flaws.

It was not, indeed, the complete peace of justice which Wilson had promised and which, at times, he has since implied he believed it to be. Belgians complained that they had not been given the left bank of the Scheldt; Frenchmen were incensed because their frontier had not been protected; Italians were embittered by the refusal to approve their claims on the Adriatic; radical leaders, the world over, were frank in their expression of disappointment at the failure to inaugurate a new social order. The acquiescence in Japanese demands for Kiau-Chau was clearly dictated by expediency rather than by justice. Austria, reduced in size and bereft of material resources, was cut off from the sea and refused the possibility of joining with Germany. The nationalistic ambitions of the Rumanians, of the Jugoslavs, of the Czechoslovaks, and of the Poles were aroused to such an extent that conflicts could hardly be avoided. Hungary, deprived of the rim of subject nationalities, looked forward to the first opportunity of reclaiming her sovereignty over them. The Ruthenians complained of Polish domination. Further to the east lay the great unsettled problem of Russia.

But the most obvious flaws in the treaty are to be found in the economic clauses. It was a mistake to compel Germany to sign a blank check in the matter of reparations. Germany and the world needed to know the exact amount that was to be paid, in order that international commerce might be set upon a stable basis. The extent of control granted to the Allies over German economic life was unwise and unfair.

Complete justice certainly was not achieved by President Wilson at Paris, and it may be questioned whether all the decisions can be regarded even as expedient. The spirit of the Fourteen Points, as commonly interpreted, had not governed the minds of those who sat at the council table. The methods adopted by the Council of Ten and the Council of Four were by no means those to which the world looked forward when it hailed the ideal expressed in the phrase, "Open covenants openly arrived at." The "freedom of the seas," if it meant the disappearance of the peculiar position held by Great Britain on the seas, was never seriously debated, and Wilson himself, in an interview given to the London Times, sanctioned "Britain's peculiar position as an island empire." Adequate guarantees for the reduction of armaments were certainly not taken at Paris; all that was definitely stipulated was the disarmament of the enemy, a step by no means in consonance with the President's earlier policy which aimed at universal disarmament. An "absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims" was hardly carried out by granting the German colonies to the great powers, even as mandatories of the League of Nations.

Nevertheless the future historian will probably hold that the Peace Conference, with all its selfish interests and mistakes, carried into effect an amazingly large part of President Wilson's programme, when all the difficulties of his position are duly weighed. The territorial settlements, on the whole, translated into fact the demands laid down by the more special of Wilson's Fourteen Points. France, Belgium, and the other invaded countries were, of course, evacuated and their restoration promised; Alsace-Lorraine was returned to France and the wrong of 1871 thus righted; an independent Poland was recognized and given the assured access to the sea that Wilson had insisted upon; the subject nationalities of Austria-Hungary received not merely autonomy but independence. Even as regards the larger principles enunciated in the Fourteen Points, it may at least be argued that President Wilson secured more than he lost. Open diplomacy in the sense of conducting international negotiations in an open forum was not the method of the Peace Conference; and it may not be possible or even desirable. The article in the Covenant, however, which insists upon the public registration of all treaties before their validity is recognized, goes far towards a fulfillment of the President's pledge of open covenants, particularly if his original meaning is liberally interpreted. Similarly the Covenant makes provision for the reduction of armaments. If the treaty did not go far in assuring the "removal of economic barriers," at all events the Conference did much to provide for an international control of traffic which would ensure to all European countries, so far as possible, equal facilities for forwarding their goods.

Apart from the Fourteen Points Wilson had emphasized two other principles as necessary to a just and permanent peace. The first of these was that the enemy should be treated with a fairness equal to that accorded to the Allies; the second was the principle that peoples should have the right to choose the government by which they were to be ruled—the principle of self-determination. Neither of these principles received full recognition in the peace settlement. Yet their spirit was infused more completely throughout the settlement than would have been the case had not Wilson been at Paris, and to that extent the just and lasting qualities of the peace were enhanced. In the matter of German reparations the question of justice was not the point at issue; the damage committed by Germany surpassed in value anything that the Allies could exact from her. As to frontiers, the unbiased student will probably admit that full justice was done Germany when the aspirations of France for annexation of the Saar district and the provinces on the left bank of the Rhine were disappointed; it was the barest justice to France, on the other hand, that she should receive the coal mines of the former district and that the latter should be demilitarized. In the question of Danzig, and the Polish corridor to the sea, it was only fair to Poland that she receive the adequate outlet which was necessary to her economic life and which had been promised her, even if it meant the annexation of large German populations, many of which had been artificially brought in as colonists by the Berlin Government; and in setting up a free city of Danzig, the Conference broke with the practices of old style diplomacy and paid a tribute to the rights of peoples as against expediency. The same may be said of the decision to provide for plebiscites in East Prussia and in upper Silesia. On the other hand, the refusal to permit the incorporation of the new, lesser Austria within Germany was at once unjust and unwise—a concession to the most shortsighted of old-style diplomatic principles.

In the reorganization of the former Hapsburg territories, Wilsonian principles were always in the minds of the delegates, although in a few cases they were honored more in the breach than in the observance. Wilson himself surrendered to Italy extensive territories in the Tyrol south of the Brenner which, if he had followed his own professions, would have been left to Austria. A large Jugoslav population on the Julian Alps and in Istria was placed under Italian rule. The new Czechoslovak state includes millions of Germans and Magyars. The boundaries of Rumania were extended to include many non-Rumanian peoples. Bulgars were sacrificed to Greeks and to Serbs. In the settlement of each problem the balance always inclined a little in favor of the victors. But the injustices committed were far less extensive than might have been expected, and in most cases where populations were included under alien rule, the decision was based less on political considerations than on the practical factors of terrain, rivers, and railroads which must always be taken into consideration in the drawing of a frontier. Wherever the issue was clean-cut, as for example between the selfish nationalism of the Italians in their Adriatic demands and the claim to mere economic life of the Jugoslavs, the old rule which granted the spoils to the stronger power was vigorously protested.

Whatever the mistakes of the Conference, Wilson secured that which he regarded as the point of prime importance, the League of Nations. This, he believed, would remedy the flaws and eradicate the vices of the treaties. No settlement, however perfect at the moment, could possibly remain permanent, in view of the constantly changing conditions. What was necessary was an elasticity that would permit change as change became necessary. If the disposition of the Saar basin, for example, proved to be so unwise or unjust as to cause danger of violence, the League would take cognizance of the peril and provide a remedy. If the boundaries of eastern Germany gave undue advantage to the Poles, the League would find ways and means of rectifying the frontier peacefully. If Hungary or Czechoslovakia found themselves cut off from sea-ports, the League could hear and act upon their demands for freedom of transit or unrestricted access to fair markets. That the League was necessary for such and other purposes was recognized by many notable economic experts and statesmen besides the President. Herbert Hoover insisted upon the necessity of a League if the food problems of central Europe were to be met, and Venizelos remarked that "without a League of Nations, Europe would face the future with despair in its heart." Because he had the covenant of such an association incorporated in the German treaty, Wilson accepted all the mistakes and injustices of the treaty as minor details and could say of it, doubtless in all sincerity, "It's a good job." Conscious of victory in the matter which he had held closest to his heart, the President embarked upon the George Washington on the 29th of June, the day after the signing of the treaty, and set forth for home. All that was now needed was the ratification of the treaty by the Senate.