There was much to be said in favor of the President’s point of view.  Unquestionably the American people as a whole supported him in the belief that there ought to be some international agreement, association, or concord which would lessen the possibility of future wars.  An international organization to remove in a measure the immediate causes of war, to provide means for the peaceable settlement of disputes between nations, and to draw the governments into closer friendship appealed to the general desire of the peoples of America and Europe.  The four years and more of horror and agony through which mankind had passed must be made impossible of repetition, and there seemed no other way than to form an international union devoted to the maintenance of peace by composing, as far as possible, controversies which might ripen into war.

For many years prior to 1914 an organization devoted to the prevention of international wars had been discussed by those who gave thought to warfare of the nations and who realized in a measure the precarious state of international peace.  The Hague Conventions of 1899 and of 1907 had been negotiated with that object, and it was only because of the improper aspirations and hidden designs of certain powers, which were represented at those great historic conferences, that the measures adopted were not more expressive of the common desire of mankind and more effective in securing the object sought.  The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Ginn, now the World, Peace Foundation, and the American Peace Society, and later the Society for the Judicial Settlement of International Disputes, the League to Enforce Peace, and many other organizations in America and in Europe were actively engaged in considering ways and means to prevent war, to strengthen the bonds of international good-will, and to insure the more general application of the principles of justice to disputes between nations.

The outbreak of the war and the dreadful waste and suffering which followed impelled the societies and associations then organized to redoubled effort and induced the formation of new organizations.  People everywhere began to realize that their objects were real and not merely sentimental or academic, that they were seeking practical means to remove the conditions which had made the Great War possible.  Public opinion became more and more pronounced as the subject was more widely discussed in the journals and periodicals of the day and at public meetings, the divergence of views being chiefly in regard to the means to be employed by the proposed organization and not as to the creation of the organization, the necessity for which appeared to be generally conceded.