The President of the United States, it was further urged, is a historian, and history tells him that the help given to his country against England neither came from the French people nor was actuated by sympathy for the American cause.  It was the vindictive act of one of those kings whose functions Mr. Wilson is endeavoring to abolish.  The monarch who helped the Americans was merely utilizing a favorable opportunity for depriving with a minimum of effort his adversary of lucrative possessions.  Moreover, the debt which nothing can pay was already due when in the years 1914-16 France was in imminent danger of being crushed by a ruthless enemy.  But at that time Mr. Wilson owed his re-election largely to his refusal to extricate her from that peril.  Instead of calling to mind the debt that can never be repaid he merely announced that he could not understand what the belligerents were fighting for and that in any case France’s grateful debtor was too proud to fight.  The motive which finally brought the United States into the World War may be the noblest that ever yet actuated any state, but no student of history will allow that Mr. Wilson has correctly described it.

The fact is that the French delegates and their supporters were consistent and, except in their demand for the Rhine frontier, unbending.  They drew up a program and saw that it was substantially carried out.  They declared themselves quite ready to accept Mr. Wilson’s project, but only on condition that their own was also realized, heedless of the incompatibility of the two.  And Mr. Wilson felt constrained to make their position his own, otherwise he could not have obtained the Covenant he yearned for.  And yet he must have known that acquiescence in the demands put forward by M. Clemenceau would lower the practical value of his Covenant to that of a sheet of paper.

A blunt American journal, commenting on the handiwork of the Conference, gave utterance to views which while making no pretense to courtly phraseology are symptomatic of the way in which the average man thought and spoke of the Covenant which emanated from the Supreme Council.  “We are convinced,” it said, “that the elder statesmen of Europe, typified by Clemenceau, consider it a hoax.  Clemenceau never before was so extremely bored by anything in his life as he was by the necessity of making a pious pretense in the Covenant when what he wanted was the assurance of the Triple Alliance.  He got that assurance, which, along with the French watch on the Rhine, the French in the Saar Valley and in Africa, with German money going into French coffers, makes him tolerably indulgent of the altruistic rhetoricians.

“The English, the intelligent English, we know have their tongues in their cheeks.  The Italians are petulant imperialists, and Japan doesn’t care what happens to the League so long as Japan says what shall happen in Asia."[300]