made, that the Foreign Office had distinctly disclaimed the intention of
establishing a protectorate over Persia, who is, and will remain, a
sovereign and independent state. But these explanations failed to
convince our indignant Allies. They argued, from experience, that no
trust was to be placed in those official assurances and euphemistic
phrases which are generally belied by subsequent acts.[317] They further
lamented that the long and secret negotiations which were going forward
in Teheran while the Persian delegation was wearily and vainly waiting
in Paris to be allowed to plead its country's cause before the great
world-dictators was not a good example of loyalty to the new cosmic
legislation. Had not Mr. Wilson proclaimed that peoples were no longer
to be bartered and swapped as chattels? Here the Italians and Rumanians
chimed in, reminding their kinsmen that it was the same American
statesmen who in the peace conditions first presented to Count
Brockdorff-Rantzau made over the German population of the Saar Valley to
France at the end of fifteen years as the fair equivalent of a sum of
money payable in gold, and that France at any rate had raised no
objection to the barter nor to the principle at the root of it. They
reasoned that if the principle might be applied to one case it should be
deemed equally applicable to the other, and that the only persons or
states that could with propriety demur to the Anglo-Persian arrangements
were those who themselves were not benefiting by similar transactions.

At last the Paris press, laying due weight on the alliance with Britain,
struck a new note. "It seems that these last Persian bargainings offer a
theme for conversations between our government and that of the Allies,"
one influential journal wrote.[318] At once the amicable suggestion was
taken up by the British press. The idea was to join the Syrian with the
Persian transactions and make French concessions on the other. This
compromise would compose an ugly quarrel and settle everything for the
best. For France's intentions toward the people of Syria were, it was
credibly asserted, to the full as disinterested and generous as those of
Britain toward Persia, and if the Syrians desired an English-speaking
nation rather than the French to be their mentor, it was equally true
that the Persians wanted Americans rather than British to superintend
and accelerate their progress in civilization. But instead of harkening
to th