The League was treated as a living organism before it existed.  All the problems which the Supreme Councilors found insoluble were reserved for its judgment.  Arduous functions were allotted to it before it had organs to discharge them.  Formidable tasks were imposed upon it before the means of achieving them were devised.  It is an institution so elusive and elastic that the French regard it as capable of being used as a handy instrument for coercing the Teutons, who, in turn, look upon it as a means of recovering their place in the world; the Japanese hope it may become a bridge leading to racial equality, and the governments which devised it are bent on employing it as a lever for their own politico-economic aims, which they identify with the progress of the human race.  How the peoples look upon it the future will show.

On the Monroe Doctrine in connection with the League of Nations the less said the soonest mended.  But one cannot well say less than this:  that any real society of peoples such as Mr. Wilson first conceived and advocated is as incompatible with “regional understandings like the Monroe Doctrine” as are the maintenance of national armaments and the bartering of populations.  It is immaterial whether one concludes that a Society of Nations is therefore impossible in the present conjuncture or that all those survivals of the old state system are obsolescent and should be abolished.  The two are unquestionably irreconcilable.

It would be a mistake to infer from the unanimity with which Mr. Wilson’s Covenant was finally accepted that it expressed the delegates’ genuine conceptions or sentiments.  Mr. Bullitt, one of the expert advisers to the American Peace Delegation, testified before the Senate committee in Washington that State-Secretary Lansing remarked to him:  “I consider the League of Nations at present as entirely useless.  The Great Powers have simply gone ahead and arranged the world to suit themselves.  England and France, in particular, have gotten out of the Treaty everything they wanted.  The League of Nations can do nothing to alter any unjust clauses of the Treaty except by the unanimous consent of the League members.  The Great Powers will never consent to changes in the interests of weaker peoples."[358]

This opinion which Mr. Bullitt ascribed to Mr. Lansing was, to my knowledge, that of a large number of the representatives of the nations at the Conference.  Among them all I have met very few who had a good word to say of the scheme, and of the few one had helped to formulate it, another had assisted him.  And the unfavorable judgments of the remainder were delivered after the Covenant was signed.