The British Premier, like his French colleague, was solicitous chiefly about making peace with the enemy and redeeming as far as possible his election pledges to his supporters.  To that end everything else would appear to have been subordinated.  To the ambitious project of a world reform he and M. Clemenceau gave what was currently construed as a nominal assent, but for a long time they had no inkling of Mr. Wilson’s intention to interweave the peace conditions with the Covenant.  So far, indeed, were they both from entertaining the notion that the two Premiers expressly denied—­and allowed their denial to be circulated in the press—­that the two documents were or could be made mutually interdependent.  M. Pichon assured a group of journalists that no such intention was harbored.[91] Mr. Lloyd George is understood to have gone farther and to have asked what degree of relevancy a Covenant for the members of the League could be supposed to possess to a treaty concluded with a nation which for the time being was denied admission to that sodality.  And as we saw, he was incurious enough not to read the narrative of what had been done by his own American colleagues even after the Havas Agency announced it.

To President Wilson, on the other hand, the League was the magnum opus of his life.  It was to be the crown of his political career, to mark the attainment of an end toward which all that was best in the human race had for centuries been consciously or unconsciously wending without moving perceptibly nearer.  Instinctively he must have felt that the Laodicean support given to him by his colleagues would not carry him much farther and that their fervor would speedily evaporate once the Conference broke up and their own special aims were definitely achieved or missed.  With the shrewdness of an experienced politician he grasped the fact that if he was ever to present his Covenant to the world clothed with the authority of the mightiest states, now was his opportunity.  After the Conference it would be too late.  And the only contrivance by which he could surely reckon on success was to insert the Covenant in the Peace Treaty and set before his colleagues an irresistible incentive for elaborating both at the same time.

He had an additional motive for these tactics in the attitude of a section of his own countrymen.  Before starting for Paris he had, as we saw, made an appeal to the electorate to return to the legislature only candidates of his own party to the exclusion of Republicans, and the result fell out contrary to his expectations.  Thereupon the oppositional elements increased in numbers and displayed a marked combative disposition.  Even moderate Republicans complained in terms akin to those employed by ex-President Taft of Mr. Wilson’s “partizan exclusion of Republicans in dealing with the highly important matter of settling the results of the war.  He solicited a commission in which the Republicans had no representation and in which there were no prominent Americans of any real experience and leadership of public opinion."[92]