guments
pointless and lent irresistible force to his injunctions. Greece's
dispute with Bulgaria was a classic instance. The Bulgars repaired to
Paris more as claimants in support of indefeasible rights than as
vanquished enemies summoned to learn the conditions imposed on them by
the nations which they had betrayed and assailed. Victory alone could
have justified their territorial pretensions; defeat made them
grotesque. All at once, however, it was bruited abroad that President
Wilson had become Bulgaria's intercessor and favored certain of her
exorbitant claims. One of these was for the annexation of part of the
coast of western Thrace, together with a seaport at the expense of the
Greeks, the race which had resided on the seaboard for twenty-five
hundred consecutive years. M. Venizelos offered them instead one
commercial outlet[118] and special privileges in another, and the
plenipotentiaries of Great Britain, France, and Japan considered the
offer adequate.

But Mr. Wilson demurred. A commercial outlet through foreign territory,
he said, might possibly be as good as a direct outlet through one's own
territory in peace-time, but not in time of war, and, after all, one
must bear in mind the needs of a country during hostilities. In the
mouth of the champion of universal peace that was an unexpected
argument. It had been employed by Italy in favor of her claim to Fiume.
Mr. Wilson then met it by invoking the economic requirements of
Jugoslavia, and by declaring that the Treaty was being devised for
peace, not for war, that the League of Nations would hinder wars, or at
the very least supply the deficiencies of those states which had
sacrificed strategical positions for humanitarian aims. But in the case
of Bulgaria he was taking what seems the opposite position and
transgressing his own principle of nationality in order to maintain it.

Mr. Wilson, pursuing his line of argument, further pointed out that the
Supreme Council had not accepted as sufficient for Poland an outlet
through German territory, but had created the city-state of Dantzig in
order to confer a greater degree of security upon the Polish republic.
To that M. Venizelos replied that there was no parity between the two
instances. Poland had no outlet to the sea except through Dantzig, and
could not, therefore, allow that one to remain in the hands of an
unfriendly nation, whereas Bulgaria already possessed two very
commodious ports, Varna and Burgas, on