before drafting the provisions constituting a League of Nations and which did not purport to be a completed document, are given in full because there seems no simpler method of showing the differences between the President and me as to the form, functions, and authority of an international organization.  They should be compared with the draft of the “Covenant” which the President had when these proposed articles were handed to him; the text of the President’s draft appears in the Appendix (page 281).  Comparison will disclose the irreconcilable differences between the two projects.

Of these differences the most vital was in the character of the international guaranty of territorial and political sovereignty.  That difference has already been discussed.  The second in importance was the practical repudiation by the President of the doctrine of the equality of nations, which, as has been shown, was an unavoidable consequence of an affirmative guaranty which he had declared to be absolutely essential to an effective world union.  The repudiation, though by indirection, was none the less evident in the recognition in the President’s plan of the primacy of the Great Powers through giving to them a permanent majority on the “Executive Council” which body substantially controlled the activities of the League.  A third marked difference was in Mr. Wilson’s exaltation of the executive power of the League and the subordination of the administration of legal justice to that power, and in my advocacy of an independent international judiciary, whose decisions would be final and whose place in the organization of the nations would be superior, since I considered a judicial tribunal the most practical agency for removing causes of war.

The difference as to international courts and the importance of applied legal justice requires further consideration in order to understand the divergence of views which existed as to the fundamental idea of organization of the League.

President Wilson in his Covenant, as at first submitted to the American Commissioners, made no provision for the establishment of a World Court of Justice, and no reference of any sort was made to The Hague Tribunal of Arbitration.  It is not, in my opinion, a misstatement to say that the President intentionally omitted judicial means of composing international disputes preferring to leave settlements of that sort to arrangement between the parties or else to the Body of Delegates or the Executive Council, both of which bodies being essentially diplomatic or political in their composition would lack the judicial point of view, since their members would presumably be influenced by their respective national interests and by political considerations rather than by a desire and purpose to do impartial justice by applying legal principles.