for evil. And it seems a thousand pities that the governments, whose own
interests are at stake, as well as those of the communities they govern,
should go out of their way to provide an explosive element for
Bolshevism and its less sinister variants."

The League was treated as a living organism before it existed. All the
problems which the Supreme Councilors found insoluble were reserved for
its judgment. Arduous functions were allotted to it before it had organs
to discharge them. Formidable tasks were imposed upon it before the
means of achieving them were devised. It is an institution so elusive
and elastic that the French regard it as capable of being used as a
handy instrument for coercing the Teutons, who, in turn, look upon it as
a means of recovering their place in the world; the Japanese hope it may
become a bridge leading to racial equality, and the governments which
devised it are bent on employing it as a lever for their own
politico-economic aims, which they identify with the progress of the
human race. How the peoples look upon it the future will show.

On the Monroe Doctrine in connection with the League of Nations the less
said the soonest mended. But one cannot well say less than this: that
any real society of peoples such as Mr. Wilson first conceived and
advocated is as incompatible with "regional understandings like the
Monroe Doctrine" as are the maintenance of national armaments and the
bartering of populations. It is immaterial whether one concludes that a
Society of Nations is therefore impossible in the present conjuncture or
that all those survivals of the old state system are obsolescent and
should be abolished. The two are unquestionably irreconcilable.

It would be a mistake to infer from the unanimity with which Mr.
Wilson's Covenant was finally accepted that it expressed the delegates'
genuine conceptions or sentiments. Mr. Bullitt, one of the expert
advisers to the American Peace Delegation, testified before the Senate
committee in Washington that State-Secretary Lansing remarked to him: "I
consider the League of Nations at present as entirely useless. The Great
Powers have simply gone ahead and arranged the world to suit themselves.
England and France, in particular, have gotten out of the Treaty
everything they wanted. The League of Nations can do nothing to alter
any unjust clauses of the Treaty except by the unanimous consent of the
League members. The Great Powers will never conse