General Smuts, before quitting Paris for South Africa, frankly admitted that the Peace Treaty will not give us the real peace which the peoples hoped for, and that peace-making would not begin until after the signing of the Treaty.  The Echo de Paris wrote:  “As for us, we never believed in the Society of Nations."[373] And again:  “The Society of Nations is now but a bladder, and nobody would venture to describe it as a lantern."[374] The Bolshevist dictator Lenin termed it “an organization to loot the world."[375]

The Allies themselves are at sixes and sevens.  The French are suspicious of the British.  A large section of the American people is profoundly dissatisfied with the part played by the English and the French at the Conference; Italy is stung to the quick by the treatment she received from France, Britain, and the United States; Rumania loathes the very names of those for whom she staked her all and sacrificed so much; in Poland and Belgium the English have lost the consideration which they enjoyed before the Conference; the Greeks are wroth with the American delegates; the majority of Russians literally execrate their ex-Allies and turn to the Germans and the Japanese.

“The resettlement of central Europe,” writes an American journal,[376] “is not being made for the tranquillity of the liberated principles, but for the purposes of the Great Powers, among whom France is the active, and America and Britain the passive, partners.  In Germany its purpose is the permanent elimination of the German nation as a factor in European politics....  We cannot save Europe by playing the sinister game now being played.  There is no peace, no order, no security in it....  What it can do is to aggravate the mischief and intensify the schisms.”

A distinguished American, who is a consistent friend of England,[377] in a review article affirmed that the proposed League of Nations is slowly undermining the Anglo-American Entente.  “There is in America a growing sense of irritation that she should be forever entangled in the spider-web of European politics.” ...  And if the Senate in the supposed interests of peace should ratify the League, he adds, “In my judgment no greater harm could result to Anglo-American unity than such reluctant consent."[378]

Some of Mr. Wilson’s fellow-countrymen who gave him their whole-hearted support when he undertook to establish a regime of right and justice sum up the result of his labors in Paris as follows:[379]

“His solemn warning against special alliances emerged as a special alliance with Britain and France.  His repeated condemnations of secret treaties emerges as a recognition that ’they could not honorably be brushed aside,’ even though they conflicted with equally binding public engagements entered into after they had been written.  Openly arrived at covenants were not openly arrived at.  The removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers was applied