ve 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]

Peace was at last signed, not on the basis