The War was over and the United States was setting the brakes on its war machinery, setting them so hurriedly in some cases that they created situations almost as destructive as war. There was nothing left now for the Woman’s Committee of the Council of National Defense but to clean up and move out. Dr. Anna stayed by while an admirable executive secretary and a small clerical force put things into order, reported what had been done, thanked everybody for his or her cooperation.

By the end of the year my desk had been cleared and I was preparing for a new job, to go to France for the Red Cross Magazine. My old editor, John S. Phillips, had been in charge there for some months, making a really significant and stimulating journal. He wanted a fresh eye on the rehabilitation work the organization was carrying on in France. He thought I might furnish it. I agreed to try.

Crossing the ocean in January, 1919, gave one some notions of what war had done to the accustomed orderly procedure of life. I was to sail to Bordeaux at a fixed hour; but no ship as yet went on time, though passengers were expected to arrive on time and to sit for hours as we were locked in the waiting room at the dock. At least it gave you an opportunity to eye as a whole those who were to be your fellow passengers. Everybody on my ship was evidently connected with some problem of restoration, the most interesting being the French bent on rehabilitating families they feared were stripped of everything. They were even taking food. As we waited a woman who guarded two enormous hams explained to me that her mother had begged her to bring a jambon. She had not had a jambon for so long. It was a new idea to me. I knew that sweets would be welcome to my friends, and I had armed myself with chocolates and bonbons; but a jambon! Why should I not take one to my dear Madame Marillier? Securing a permit to leave the dock, I hunted up a neighboring market and after much negotiation persuaded a wholesale dealer to sell me a ham, almost as big as I was. It was a problem to get it into the ship, but it was more of a problem to get it off, get it to Paris. I had queer ideas of what I might need in the way of luggage, and in my equipment was a pair of enormous saddlebags into which I had thrown high boots, heavy blankets, sweaters, woolen tights and hose—just in case. Crowding them all into one bag, into the other I put my jambon. In the long and tedious railroad journey from Bordeaux to Paris, I was packed in with a group of fine serious young Quakers going over to help a reconstruction project, and that terrible piece of luggage jumped from the rack and almost brained one of my companions. I cannot recall all the adventures of that ham, but I know that I was never more relieved than when I laid it at the feet of my old friend.

“What in the world?” she exclaimed (or its equivalent). And Seignobos said, “Oh, these Americans.”

I was not long in Paris before I felt keenly that many of the French were saying, “Oh, these Americans!” We seemed to swarm over everything, to absorb things. At least this was true in the quarters where, at the urgency of my friends Auguste Jaccaci and William Allen White, I had gone to live—the HÔtel de Vouillemont just off the Place de la Concorde.

Walking down the Rue de Rivoli to the Red Cross Headquarters was like walking the streets of Washington in the vicinity of the governmental departments active in the prosecution of the War. All the familiar faces seemed to have been transported to Paris, as indeed great numbers of them had. Mingling with them were officers and men on leave, many seeking desperately to drown ghastly memories in any form of pleasure that would bring forgetfulness, more of them intent on sightseeing, buying gifts to take home. I found the pleasantest duty my Red Cross uniform brought me in Paris was when stalwart doughboys accosted me. “Say, sister, won’t you help me find something to take home to my mother—my girl?” Before we were through with the shopping I had the family history but never a word about the war—that was done with. They wanted to forget it and go home. They resented the delay.

“We have paid our debt to Lafayette. Now who in hell do we owe?” This was the legend I saw once on a camion crossing the Place de la Concorde. I was told it was torn down by a scandalized officer and forbidden to be used in the future. But it expressed the doughboy’s opinion, as I got it, better than anything else I saw or heard.

Not only the scenes in my quarter but the conditions of living shattered all my preconceived notions of hardship. I had been prepared for hardtack, but once at Vouillemont I found that if I took the trouble to market and bring in my purchases I could supplement the unbalanced meals with almost anything I wanted. The prices were high to be sure—sixteen cents each for eggs—two to four dollars a pound for butter—a dollar and a half for a little jar of honey. Many extras could be bought more cheaply at the American Commissariat. William Allen White was buying at the Commissariat the prunes on which he seemed principally to live, but marketing gave me the opportunity I wanted for finding out what the alert Parisian shopkeepers were thinking and saying. I sounded out that opinion daily until it was cut off by the conviction running through the town that America no longer sympathized fully with the French, that she was not going to force Germany to pay the sixty-five billion dollars the people felt they should have.

The Americans living around the Place de la Concorde assured me that Paris was not changed; not for them perhaps, but when I went among my old French friends, most of whom had stuck it through the War, changes stared me in the face. I had hurried to my old quarter on the Left Bank. Great gaps in the circle around the PanthÉon and in the Boulevard Saint-Michel skirting the Luxembourg told the story of what the quarter had endured. The laiterie where once I had bought eggs and milk and cheese was gone, the space carefully boarded. I hunted among the neighbors for the cheerful Madame whom I had so enjoyed. She had died with the building, they told me.

There were little neglects in the once carefully kept apartments of my friends that affected me all out of proportion to their importance. The door into Madame Marillier’s chambre À coucher would not close.

“Nothing has been mended in Paris, you know, now for three years,” my friend explained.

It was literally true: nothing painted, nothing mended, little replaced. Craftsmen and tradesmen were in the trenches or in their graves. So many of those whom once you had known, the people who had served you or had been your comrades, were in their graves. Madame Marillier, pointing to a long roster of names on her desk in the salon, said: “Look, these are our dead. Read them. You will remember some of the names.” And I did, men whom I had known twenty-five years before, and whose brilliant talk I had listened to at her Wednesday night dinners.

They could not bring back their dead; but after all the horror life was to go on, and they were bravely doing their best to give it something of its character before the War.

One thing they were counting on was the return to their homes and to the museums of their treasured belles choses. When I went out to dinner with French acquaintances who had possessed beautiful things, often pictures catalogued as national treasures, empty frames stared from the walls. The canvases had been cut out and sent to a safe place, generally somewhere in the South; but they would soon have them back, and that would help.

Not only in Paris but wherever invasion was threatened there had been an immediate effort to hustle the best loved treasures out of reach. At Amiens, they told me, they had “sent away” the famous L’Ange pleurant. It was back when I was there in March, and people were coming from all the towns near by to see it, to gloat and weep over it.

I was concerned with the fate of the “pretty girl of Lille” that exquisite wax bust attributed by some to Leonardo da Vinci; and when I made Lille my headquarters for a few days I at once made inquiries. The gallery was closed, but there had just been received many boxes of pictures which the Germans were carrying off when stopped on their retreat. The authorities were not adverse to having an accredited journalist see with his own eyes what had happened, and I was permitted to visit the gallery. The boxes were there standing against the wall, still unopened, and on each was clearly printed the name of the picture and of the German museum to which it had been assigned—beautiful evidence of the amazing efficiency with which the Germans had conducted their looting.

“Why, there,” I said as I went about, “there is the ‘pretty girl of Lille’!”

The curator winked at me. “Do you think so?” he said. “That is what the German Emperor thought when he went through the museum. It is a replica. The pretty girl is in a safe place and she will stay there until I am sure they won’t come back.” (“They” was the term I heard almost universally applied to the Germans in the devastated regions.)

Everywhere was the same joy over the safety and the return of their belles choses. I think I have never been in a group where gratitude mingled with sorrow was stronger than when my friend Auguste Jaccaci, who had been in Paris throughout the War at the head of the beautiful work for Belgian and French children lost or orphaned by the War, asked me to go with him to the opening of a room in the Louvre, closed of course through the dark period. It was one of the smaller galleries, but in it had been gathered new possessions, things bought in the War, others left by wills, a collection of choicest pieces. They were welcomed by the leading connoisseurs of the city: the directors of the Louvre and the Luxembourg, a few artists, a few great ladies. Everybody was in black and went about with unsmiling but touching appreciation, hardly believing, it seemed to me, that again he or she was free to rejoice in beauty. It was like coming home after the long funeral of a beloved member of a family.

But I was more concerned with the everyday conditions under which humble people were living, particularly in the territory so lately occupied. That was where the Red Cross could now be of the most practical help, it seemed to me. It took but little looking about to see that nothing we could provide would come amiss, either to those who had been caught and so remained through the War or to those who were now coming back, generally under the protest of the authorities.

I had not imagined that a bombardment could so strip a community, a countryside, of all the little conveniences of life. At Lens—once a great manufacturing and mining town, now a vast mass of red brick dust, hardly a wall left—I went about looking for signs of life, for I had been told that a few people had weathered the horror and were to be found living underground. Coming on what seemed to be a path running over a pile of debris, I followed it into an opening; and there, in what was left of a basement, sat a woman sewing. There was a fire on the hearth. She got up to greet me—a child ran out, a little girl with tousled head, dirty and ragged. “You must pardon the way we look. We have been here for many months. We haven’t a comb. No pins, nothing. But we are happy they have gone.”

Every now and then I came upon little groups who had found shelter in enemy trenches throughout the War. In a small town southeast of Laon, in the region occupied at the beginning of the War and held until the final retreat, I came upon a half-dozen children who had been brought up in the trenches. A couple of French sisters had come back to the region and were trying to civilize them. “You have no idea,” they told me, “how difficult it is to teach them to use handkerchiefs.” This was an apology for running noses. But, if ignorant of all civilized ways, these youngsters were remarkably healthy. They had had the food of the invaders, and they had lived in the earth very much like young animals. While they knew nothing of books they knew everything about war: guns, batteries, shells, uniforms. On the latter they had positive ideas. They had never seen a Red Cross uniform before, and they criticized it openly: “pas chic”—by which I suppose they meant “bungling.” And I must confess mine was.

Continually as I went about I asked myself how it could be that every pin, every needle, every spool of thread, every comb, had gone. Larger articles you understood, but these little things! The silence of the devastated regions was even more perplexing than this stripping. I drove to the Belgian border several times, and it was a long time before I could make out why it was so still. Finally it occurred to me that I saw and heard nothing alive, no cat, no dog, no hen. All these creatures had completely disappeared. And when they began to be brought back the rejoicing was like that of the return of the beautiful things to the cities. One would live again perhaps.

At Vic-sur-Aisne where the American Committee for Devastated France was carrying on its fine practical work, among the many, many, things it was doing was attempting to restock with poultry. The daughter of an eminent New York family had an incubator in her bedroom where she told me she soon hoped to have a flock of chicks. The day that I was there a hen which had been imported laid an egg. It was an event in the countryside. I saw peasant women wipe away tears that day as they looked at that hen and her egg. They would live again.

I shared this feeling later when spring began to come, and in going over torn battlefields I saw the primroses. One day I heard a skylark sing and sing until it came out of the blue and dropped like a stone to the ground. It was like a voice of promise from heaven.

What saved one’s reason within this immense devastation—so completely, incredibly horrible—was the intelligent and energetic way in which restoration was going on. Highways had been opened from Paris to Lille and on to Brussels. They included such shattered towns as Albert, Arras, BÉthune, Lens, ArmentiÈres. I could go comfortably, and did, to Ypres, Cambrai, Saint-Quentin, Laon, Rheims—to all important points in northeastern France and along the border. It was when you disobeyed orders and explored unopened territory that you got into trouble. I tried Messines Ridge and landed in a shell hole. It took twenty small Annamese, located by my doughboy chauffeur at work on a clean-up job a mile or so away, to lift out our car and carry it a quarter of a mile to something like safety. The angry berating of an English officer—the English being responsible in that territory—still rings in my ears.

The most heartening sight was the steady, slow redemption of the mutilated land. As a rule the job of clearing away the first layer of war debris was given to German prisoners and soldiers from French colonies. It was a horrifying mess of abandoned tanks, artillery, guns, shells, hand grenades—not all duds, unhappily, as daily accidents demonstrated. With the debris cleared away, the heavy task of leveling the land followed. It was often deeply riddled, as over the Chemin des Dames, where the underpinning of hard white limestone lay shattered on the top—the soil far below. After the leveling came the tractors plowing the land, and finally the seeding. Along the highways outside of most of the big wrecked towns I saw between Paris and Lille were short stretches in one or another stage of this orderly redemption.

French, English, and Americans were all connected with the restoration. What really mattered, I felt, was the work of the French: first, it was their business; then, they understood their people—what they could and could not expect them to do. They were most successful in getting individuals to do the things they had always done in the way they had always done them. The American workers, marvelous as they were, wanted to reform the French modes of life. They were keen on sanitation and chintz curtains; the Frenchmen were keen on community tractors; the Frenchwomen, on community sewing machines.

After I had seen one little group of Frenchwomen gathered by an energetic duchess in a wing of her battered chÂteau making over old clothes for ragged refugees, who had had literally nothing new for years, I thought I knew what the Red Cross could best do for the devastated regions.

The Red Cross had on hand at the end of the war millions of garments, the output of thousands of little sewing and knitting circles scattered from ocean to ocean and from Great Lakes to Gulf. Innumerable shirts, drawers, pajamas, scarfs, sweaters, were piled in storehouses—the most extensive that I saw being at Lille. My cry was: “Turn them over to the French sewing circles so rapidly forming and if possible send a sewing machine with them. You can be sure that the Kalamazoo pajamas, the Topeka shirts, everybody’s sweaters, will be refitted for children and men and women who at present have not a decent shirt to their backs, or decent drawers to their legs.” A desultory distribution was already making, but I wanted it general and systematic. It was consoling to have found at least one thing, obvious as it was, which I felt I could energetically back.

Practical help was the more worth while because so intelligently turned to use. The few returning to the towns from which they had been driven often showed amazing resourcefulness and courage. They wanted to rebuild their homes, set up their shops; but when they came to the town where they once had lived it frequently was impossible to find the spot which they supposed they owned. At Cantigny, an utterly devastated flat ruin the day I saw it, a Frenchman and his wife appeared and quietly went about trying to locate the site of their home. They went away in disagreement as to where their street had run.

At PÉronne I talked with a carpenter who had set up his shop. He told me he had had difficulty in finding his old location, but he thought he was on the right spot—at least the authorities told him he might settle there. By pulling scaffoldings from tumbledown houses and bringing in corrugated iron from near-by trenches he had made himself a waterproof shelter, arranged a workbench and already was earning a little money helping the authorities here and there in the cleaning up. A piece of constructive work he had taken on was salvaging doors. Here he had found a solid doorframe, there a panel; and, putting these together, he was producing a stock. He was certain it would not be long before he would have customers for them.

All this put heart in me in the same way the first primrose, the first skylark, had done. There was an indomitable something in men then, as there was in nature, something that made them live and grow.

Paris and the Peace Conference taxed my faith more severely than the devastated regions. My brother back in the United States wrote me that the job the Conference seemed to have set itself was as big as creating the world. Men were not big enough for that, and one was aghast that they felt so equal to it—or, if not that, were willing to give the impression of feeling equal.

What scared me was that so many battered people accepted this notion of what the Conference could and would do. From all over the globe they brought their wrongs and hopes and needs to be satisfied. Many of them also brought along ideas for the making and running of the new world—ideas in which they felt the quality of inspiration. The success of the Conference would depend in the mind of each of these suppliants, upon his getting what he was after.

But at the very outset they were balked by their failure to reach the one man who they believed had not only the will but the power to satisfy their grievances and hopes—the Messiah of the Conference, Woodrow Wilson.

There was always somebody in the complex and all-embracing organization of the Conference to hear, sift, report their case; but again and again they could get no notion of what was happening to it. Insistence on an answer, on knowing how things were going, often closed doors which at first had welcomed them. I felt this deeply in the case of the Armenians. My interest in them had been aroused by a delegation at the HÔtel de Vouillemont. In the number was a woman with one of the most beautiful and tragic faces that I had ever looked on. It was not long before this woman was putting her case before me in excellent English, for she had had all the advantages of a European education. She and her companions had all suffered from the cruel and relentless atrocities which had paralyzed their country. Now their hope was that the United States would take the mandate for Armenia. Before I realized it I had become a determined advocate of that solution of their problem. I feel sure that, if we had gone into the League of Nations, I should have felt called to work for a mandate for Armenia.

The saddest thing was to see the gradual fall of their hopes, to know the day had come when, whatever had been the original reception, they could no longer get the ear of principals or experts. Balfour was said to have shouted at an aide as he threw the memoranda of the Armenians in the corner: “Do not bring me another of these things at this Conference. I know all I want to know about this cause, and I will not read any more memoranda.”

Something of this kind was happening in delegation after delegation, and as hope went out of the suppliants resentment took its place. Soon many of the disappointed were joining the no small number that from the start had come to Paris, so far as I could see, to do their best to ruin the Conference. From every country came political opponents of the chosen delegates and of the settlements which they were seeking; from no country were there more of these than from the United States, and certainly from no country were there so many whose chief weapon was malicious gossip.

There was nothing for these political malcontents to do but talk, and that they did whenever they could find a listener—in cafÉs, on street corners, at French dinner tables—dinner tables becoming more and more unsympathetic as it began to be rumored that the full measure of punishment they asked was not to be given Germany. These groups naturally absorbed the bewildered people who were getting no answer to their supplications, who were being put off from day to day. It was easy to persuade them that the Peace Conference was a failure.

What startled me as the days went on was the passing of the will to peace which had been strong, even taken for granted at the start. Hate was replacing it. Again and again I recalled in those days a shrine I had once seen in Brittany called “Our Lady of the Hates”—one of those frank realistic shrines where symbolic figures portray the devils which torment men and prevent peaceful living. That shrine haunted my dreams when the confusion and bitterness seemed daily more confounded.

The social revolutionists at the Peace Conference never reached the point of building barricades as I had seen them do in Paris twenty-five years before; but they did make it rather lively on May 1st and inconvenient for many people who wanted to do their part in keeping the world moving in an orderly fashion—their humdrum part of delivering milk, looking after the sick, keeping things clean. They threatened such dire calamity if they were not allowed to meet and obstruct circulation in certain central places that the Government, usually stupid in such matters, shut down on their ambition so completely that of course they collected in these forbidden places and did their best to cause bloodshed.

I remember one young thing who thought the time had come and meant to be in the center of carnage. She went out early in the morning and posted herself on the steps of the Madeleine and sat there all day in a state of honest, genuine enthusiasm ready to sacrifice herself as well as everybody in sight. But there was no real fray—only some discouraging little street rows, with theatrical attempts to make capital out of them, and a few pitiful dead, little useful people with dependents taking a holiday and eager to see.

It was a great day for American doughboys. They had been ordered to stay indoors, to give up their firearms, and to do nothing that in any way would invite disaster. Their answer was like that of the would-be revolutionist for they streamed by hundreds over the monuments and cannon of the Place de la Concorde. There was not a monument or a point of vantage around that Place that any human being could climb to that was not occupied by these youths. If there was to be a revolution, they were going to be there to see it break out.

That which contributed more than anything else, it seemed to me at the time, to the suspicion and commotion around the Peace Conference was that it fed the onlookers (the press included) so little actual information to chew on. The delegates and committees sat behind closed doors, only spoke when a conclusion was reached, a document adopted. The public wanted to sit in a gallery and hear the discussions leading to conclusions and documents, and—being shut out—speculated, gossiped, believed the worst, spread false and damaging reports.

It took out its resentment by creating a four-headed monster—Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Orlando—preparing to dragoon the world into a fresh crop of unholy alliances and commitments and to refuse justice to multitudes of small and weak peoples and causes. It was prepared beforehand to doubt whatever the Conference did.

In the confusion and discouragement the one concrete thing I found was the International Labor Conference. At the beginning of the century one of the hopes of pacifists like Dr. Jordan, Jane Addams, and their associates had been the International Association for Labor Legislation, organized in 1900. It had been carried on without much help from labor itself until the War came; then labor set up a loud demand for international action. The undertaking added to that Americanization of the Place de la Concorde and the Rue de Rivoli which had struck me on my arrival. Many men and women I had known when I was working editorially and otherwise on labor relations turned up. It was like home to see Mr. Gompers barging up and down the Rue de Rivoli and to run onto Mary Anderson and Rose Schneiderman in the garden of the Tuileries.

I was lucky enough to fall in at the start with Dr. James T. Shotwell, the active head of the labor committee of the American delegation. Dr. Shotwell’s intelligence and patience were of the utmost help, I have always felt, in getting the final agreement adopted, early in April in a full session. Certainly it was due to his generous explanations that I was able to follow what was going on.

At the same time I had the satisfaction of finding old-time French friends interested and active in the undertaking—most important of these Albert Thomas, who from the start was one of the vital influences in the Conference. Then my old friend Seignobos was actively interested. Shotwell in his “At the Paris Peace Conference” describes him as “a little old man, talking fast and furiously, very well satisfied with our labor business, which he seems to hold in higher regard than we do.” Seignobos did hold it in high regard, hoped much for its future. I suspect he too was glad to find something in the complicated peace negotiations he could put his hands on, see through.

One of the most unexpected of my experiences in these days was the revival of past episodes in my life. The friends I had known so well in Paris back in the nineties, such as had escaped death or disability, were constantly turning up in important positions. Most influential among them all was the Englishman Wickham Steed, now the editor of the London Times, a person who ranked with ambassadors, but who was good enough to take notice of his old Latin Quarter friends.

Another of my intimates of those days was Charles Borgeaud, who had come up from Geneva with the Swiss plan for a confederation of nations, a sound and excellent document, which I suppose was filed away with the multitudes of plans which flooded the Conference in those days. I was so excited by seeing about me so many of these old acquaintances and friends that I attempted to get them together for lunch one day—Seignobos, Madame Marillier, Steed, Louis Lapique, all that I could put my hands on. The result gave me a melancholy sense of what twenty-five years can do, particularly a twenty-five years ending in such a catastrophe as they had all been going through, to take the edge off once keen friendships.

A more satisfactory revival of past and gone associations came from meeting numbers of former professional friends who were filling one or another post. Here were William Allen White and Auguste Jaccaci; here was Ray Stannard Baker, the head of the American press delegation, one of the few Americans having an easy entree to the President himself, conducting his difficult post with fine judgment and an absolute fairness which silenced the tongues of some of the most bumptious and political-minded correspondents.

“How can you bully so straight a chap as Ray Baker?” a correspondent anxious for a special privilege said disconsolately in my hearing one day.

There were hours when it seemed like a gathering in the office of the old American Magazine, so natural and intimate it was.

But these hours were not very many. My business was to furnish at least an article a month for the Red Cross Magazine and to follow the progress of the efforts to bring about a peace settlement including a league of nations. There were days when it seemed to me an inexplicable confusion, a bedlam; but, as a matter of fact, as the days went on I became satisfied by studying the communiquÉs, following the press conferences, reading the reliable English and French papers and the daily digests of what the papers of the United States were saying (posted at our press quarters), that a practical plan for international cooperation was taking form and that gradually more and more of the delegates of the thirty-one nations represented were consenting to it. To get something they would all sign seemed to me creative statesmanship of the highest order. For each of these nations had problems of its own, political, economic, social, religious, which must be considered before its representative dared sign. Thirty-one varieties of folks back home sat at that peace table, and they all had to be heard. In final analysis it was the failure patiently to listen to the political objections coming from the United States and trying openly to meet them which kept us out of the largest and soundest joint attempt the world had ever seen, to put an end to war. For that is what I believed the Covenant of the League of Nations to be when I heard the final draft read and adopted at the Plenary Session of the Conference on April 28.

But no one could have studied the truly august assembly adopting the Covenant without realizing the threats to its future in its make-up. They lay in the certainty of a few that the problem was solved—there would be no more wars. President Wilson, the noblest and the most distinguished figure of them all, seemed to believe it. But there were men putting down their names who did not believe it, who sneered as they signed; and still more dangerous were the stolid ones who accepted without knowing what it meant. Clemenceau had told his people what the Covenant meant—“sacrifices,” sacrifice for all; he was the only man at the Peace Conference whom I heard use the word, and yet the key to the peace of the world is sacrifice, sacrifice of the strong to meet the needs and urges of the weak. If the League of Nations, led as it has been by the great satisfied nations, had grappled with that truth at the start, it is possible we should not now be seeing signatories take up war to satisfy their needs and urges.

These doubts weighed heavily upon me as I left the Plenary Session. But in the group of exultant Americans who that day saw the world made over I had no desire to voice them. There was only one of my friends to whom I could confide my fears—that was Auguste Jaccaci, a doubting Thomas with profound faith in some things (I never quite made out what): beauty and a directing God, I think. The night after the signing of the Covenant, Jac and I sat long in troubled silence over our coffee and petit verre, for neither of us could believe that the signing of a paper by however many nations could in itself bring immediate peace to the world.

Still I believed with all my heart in the attempt. My business now as a journalist and a lecturer, I told myself, was to explain the intent of the Covenant, what it set out to do, also to warn that it must be given time to work out its salvation.

Before leaving America for the Peace Conference I had signed a contract to go for ten weeks of the summer of 1919 on a Chautauqua circuit in the Northwest. By this time I had an understanding with my sponsors that I should be allowed to talk on what I had seen and heard at the Peace Conference. I now hurried home to fill that contract. I had hardly landed before I realized how bitter was the political attack on the Covenant. Would audiences in the Northwest listen to its defense?

But I did not allow this worry to intrude itself into my lecturing. In fact it was not in me to worry, once on the road, for I quickly discovered I was making what would probably be the most interesting trip of my life. And so it turned out. The country was incredibly exciting and of endless variety. I joined a circuit already ten weeks old in northern Utah. We skirted the Great Salt Lake and traveled from one Mormon settlement to another. It amuses me now to remember how surprised I was to discover that Mormons were like Gentiles, that I at once felt towards them exactly as I did towards different religious sects at home. True, the attempt of taxi drivers, hotel clerks, baggagemen, to convert me when they caught me idle in their vicinity was a bit disconcerting at first, but I soon began to expect it and to find interest in their arguments.

After Utah came the lava country of southern Idaho along the Snake River. We climbed over the mountains into Oregon, went down the Columbia, over to the sea, up the coast to Portland, Tacoma, Seattle. We were in the Yakima apple country and in the berry fields of Puyallup, and everywhere in cherry orchards, such cherries as I had never imagined.

For a week we junketed around Vancouver Sound in primitive little steamers. We pitched our tents in lumber towns built on stilts, crossed fire-devastated mountains into the Coeur d’Alene region of northern Idaho, where one still heard reverberations of the labor struggles which had so agitated us on McClure’s and the American. Then Montana—miles of plateaus and plains, the air thick with smoke, the earth sprinkled with ashes, for the mountains were on fire.

This magnificent and varied country carried with it a varied and compelling human story. Each new town turned up some bit of human tragedy or comedy. These people were pioneers, or pioneers once removed. They knew all the dangers, the hardships, the defeats, and conquests of pioneering. Their talk was of what they or their fathers had lived and seen. Whatever it had been, their hope was unquenchable. Every town we entered was the finest in the Northwest, the finest even when you knew that shifting trade and industry was cutting the very feet out from under it.

This was the land of Borah, but never in all those ten weeks, talking on the League of Nations, did I receive from press or individuals anything but respectful hearing. I was the first person who had come into their territory from the Peace Conference, and they wanted to hear all I had to give. They would do their own appraising.

As the days went by, I sensed a growing bewilderment at the fight against the League. These people had listened for years to people they honored urging some form of international union against war. They had heard Dr. Jordan and Jane Addams preaching a national council for the prevention of war, President Taft advocating a league to enforce peace. In many of the towns there had been chapters of these societies.

On our circuit there was a superintendent who reminded me every time we met that back in the 1890’s he had spent practically all his patrimony going about the Northwest preaching a league of nations. It irked him, he said, that I should be receiving money for talking what he twenty-five years before had talked without price, purely for love of the cause. And no wonder!

With such a background, was it strange that many people in the Northwest should have been puzzled that the Congress of the United States was seemingly more and more determined that we should not join this first attempt of the civilized world to find substitutes for war in international quarrels?

Seeking reasons for this refusal, I felt the one which had most weight with people was the guarantee that France was asking from England and the United States to come to her aid in case of unprovoked attack by Germany, that is, a guarantee which was to remain in force until the League of Nations was a going concern.

I found that most people were against this. They wouldn’t run the risk of having to help France again. I was for granting the guarantee provisionally and for a limited period. I believed such a guarantee would quiet what I felt to be one of the real dangers of the after-war situation, the near hysteria of France. Americans proud of their generous part in saving France from what looked to them like calculated annihilation said: “Why these hysterics? The War is over. The nations are going to enforce peace. The devastated region is to be restored at Germany’s expense. Forget it.”

How could America understand the years of horror France had just suffered, the devastation of centuries of loving labor, the wiping out of three and a half million of her best youth? And most serious of all perhaps, how could America realize what France so clearly realized, that the Great War was but the latest expression of centuries of determination on the part of Central Europe to reach the sea? It must have an ocean front even if this could be obtained only by crossing the dead body of France.

I had spent some hours at ChÂlons-sur-Marne just before I returned. Nobody in that town was so alive to me as Attila. Fifteen hundred years before, he had led the forces of Central Europe so far and had been stopped; but Central Europe had come back again and again, driven by the urge for the sea. Again and again France had saved herself, but she knew now she could never do it without the help of those who believed her culture one of the earth’s great possessions. She must have guarantees. But how could the United States understand that centuries of experience were behind France’s fear? They had not met Attila at ChÂlons-sur-Marne—I had.

All of this I talked in more or less detail until in midsummer my lips were closed for two weeks by William Jennings Bryan. Mr. Bryan for many years had been the brightest star of the Chautauqua platform. The management of the circuit liked to introduce him for whatever time he could give and they afford. It meant that the regular performer must either step down or divide his period. The evening was the proper hour for Mr. Bryan, for only then could the men come. Now I spoke in the evening. “Cut your time to forty minutes, and go on a half-hour earlier,” were my instructions. I, of course, obeyed.

Now Mr. Bryan was presenting a two-hour discussion of what he considered the ideal political Democratic platform at that moment. In his planks he included joining the League of Nations but turning down the guarantees to France. At our first joint appearance he rose to condemn guarantees an hour after I had pleaded for them. When he was told of the conflict of opinion he at once looked me up, and in effect told me that I must not present views opposed to his on a platform where he was speaking. He in no way tried to influence my opinion, only to shut it off. I insisted that it was good for the audience to hear both sides. “The audience came to hear me,” said Mr. Bryan; “it is important they know my views.” He did not want them confused as they might be, he said, if I began the evening by airing mine.

Of course Mr. Bryan did not say, “You are of no political importance, and I am of a great deal,” but that was what he meant. It was quite true, and I bowed for the time being to the demands of politics, but only for the moment. The two weeks over, I began again to talk guarantees with more interest on the part of my audience because of what Mr. Bryan had been saying and also, I suspect, less agreement.

By the time the circuit ended, the League was in a bad way in Congress. A bitter partisan war had broken out and Woodrow Wilson ill, his Scotch stubbornness the harder because of his illness, would not budge an inch. It was a sickening thing to watch. The only consolation was that the rest of the world wanted peace enough to make the sacrifices and run the risks a League undoubtedly demanded.

Wilson’s enemies gloated: he was beaten, stripped of his glory; the world would forget him, was already forgetting him. They were wrong.

In the months that followed the final collapse of the League as far as the United States was concerned, I was much in Washington; and nothing I saw was more moving than the continual quiet popular tributes to Woodrow Wilson. On holidays and Sundays groups were always standing before his home, watching for a glimpse of him. Let him enter a theater and the house rose to cheer, while crowds waited outside in rain and cold to see him come out—cheer him as he passed.

On November 11, 1921, the body of America’s Unknown Soldier was carried from the Capitol where it had lain in state to its grave in Arlington—a perfect ceremony of its kind. The bier was followed by all we had of official greatness at that moment: President Harding and his Cabinet, the Supreme Court, the House, the Senate, officers of the Army and Navy, and General Foch our guest of honor. At the end, following all this greatness but not of it, came a carriage. As the packed ranks between which the procession had passed in silence saw its occupants, Woodrow Wilson and Mrs. Wilson, a muffled cry of love and gratitude broke out, and that cry followed that carriage to the very doorway of their home. It was to be so until he died. He was the man they could not forget.

They will not forget him in the future. He is the first leader in the history of society who has treated the ancient dream of a peaceful world as something more than wishful thinking, the first who was willing to stake all in drawing the nations of the world together in an effort to make that “just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations” for which Abraham Lincoln pleaded.

In Paris in 1919 Woodrow Wilson actually persuaded the leaders of the majority of the earth’s nations to help him build and set up a machine for such a peace. The complaint is that it has not done all it attempted. But how can any person who knows anything of man’s past efforts to create machinery for the betterment of his life suppose that this, the most ambitious international undertaking ever made, would from the start run without friction or breakdown, would never need overhauling, even rebuilding?

That is not in the nature of things. The League has lived for eighteen years now. Its weaknesses have developed with experience, so has its usefulness. Its services to the world have been innumerable if not spectacular. If its failures have been spectacular, they have not destroyed the structure; rather they have demonstrated certain points at which it must be rebuilt.

The world will not forget the man who led in this effort to achieve enduring peace. That is what I was saying in those bitter days and have been saying in all the melancholy ones since.