Lastly, if Greece’s claims in Thrace were rejected, she would have a population of 1,790,000 souls outside her national boundaries—­that is to say, more than one-third of the population which is within her state.  Would this be fair?  Of the total population of Bulgarian and Turkish Thrace the Turks and Greeks together form 85 per cent., the Bulgars only 6 per cent., and the latter nowhere in compact masses.  Moreover—­and this ought to have clinched the matter—­the Hellenic population formed an absolute as well as a relative majority in the year 1919.

These arguments and various other considerations drawn from the inordinate ambitions, the savage cruelty,[119] and the Punic faith of the Bulgars convinced the British, French, and Japanese delegates of the soundness of Greece’s pleas, and they sided with M. Venizelos.  But Mr. Wilson clung to his idea with a tenacity which could not be justified by argument, and was concurrently explained by motives irrelevant to the merits of the case.  Whether the influence of Bulgarophil American missionaries and strong religious leanings were at the root of his insistence, as was generally assumed, or whether other considerations weighed with him, is immaterial.  And yet it is worth recording that a Bulgarian journal[120] announced with the permission of the governmental censor that the American missionaries in Bulgaria and the professors of Robert College of Constantinople had so primed the American delegates at the Conference on the question of Thrace, and generally on the Bulgarian problem, that all M. Venizelos’s pains to convince them of the justice of his contention would be lost labor."[121]

However this may be, Mr. Wilson’s attitude was the subject of adverse comment throughout Europe.  His implied claim to legislate for the world and to take over its moral leadership earned for him the epithet of “Dictator,” and provoked such epigrammatic comments among his own countrymen and the French as this:  “Louis XIV said, ‘I am the state!’ Mr. Wilson, outdoing him, exclaimed, ‘I am all the states!’”

The necessity of winning over dissentient colleagues to his grandiose scheme of world reorganization and of satisfying their demands, which were of a nature to render that scheme abortive, was the most influential agency in impairing his energies and upsetting his plans.  This remark assumes what unhappily seems a fact, that those plans were mainly mechanical.  It is certain that they made no provision for directly influencing the masses, for giving them sympathetic guidance, and enabling them to suffuse with social sentiments the aspirations and strivings which were chiefly of the materialistic order, with a view to bringing about a spiritual transformation of the social basis.  Indeed we have no evidence that the need of such a transformation of the basis of political thought, which was still rooted in the old order, was grasped by any of those who set their hand to the legislative part of the work.