With popular sentiment overwhelmingly in favor of some sort of world union which would to an extent insure the nations against another tragedy like the one which in November, 1918, had left the belligerents wasted and exhausted and the whole world a prey to social and industrial unrest, there was beyond question a demand that out of the great international assembly at Paris there should come some common agency devoted to the prevention of war.  To ignore this all-prevalent sentiment would have been to misrepresent the peoples of the civilized world and would have aroused almost universal condemnation and protest.  The President was, therefore, entirely right in giving prominence to the idea of an international union against war and in insisting that the Peace Conference should make provision for the establishment of an organization of the world with the prevention of future wars as its central thought and purpose.

The great bulk of the American people, at the time that the President left the United States to attend the Peace Conference, undoubtedly believed that some sort of organization of this nature was necessary, and I am convinced that the same popular belief prevailed in all other civilized countries.  It is possible that this assertion may seem too emphatic to some who have opposed the plan for a League of Nations, which appears in the first articles of the Treaty of Versailles, but, if these opponents of the plan will go back to the time of which I am writing, and avoid the impressions made upon them by subsequent events, they will find, I believe, that even their own views have materially changed since December, 1918.  It is true that concrete plans had then been suggested, but so far as the public knew the President had not adopted any of them or formulated one of his own.  He had not then disclosed the provisions of his “Covenant.”

The mass of the people were only concerned with the general idea.  There was no well-defined opposition to that idea.  At least it was not vocal.  Even the defeat of the Democratic Party in the Congressional elections of November, 1918, could not be interpreted to be a repudiation of the formation of a world organization.  That election, by which both Houses of Congress became Republican, was a popular rebuke to Mr. Wilson for the partisanship shown in his letter of October addressed to the American people, in which he practically asserted that it was unpatriotic to support the Republican candidates.  The indignation and resentment aroused by that injudicious and unwarranted attack upon the loyalty of his political opponents lost to the Democratic Party the Senate and largely reduced its membership in the House of Representatives if it did not in fact deprive the party of control of that body.  The result, however, did not mean that the President’s ideas as to the terms of peace were repudiated, but that his practical assertion, that refusal to accept his policies was unpatriotic, was repudiated by the American people.