tood.

Moreover, the President was still desperately striving to keep in good
understanding with the German Government, and in pursuance of this
policy James W. Gerard, the Ambassador to Germany, had declared at a
dinner in Berlin on Jan. 6 that the relations between America and
Germany had never been better than they were at that moment. This,
also, the public in the United States found it hard to understand. If
Lansing's reference to the danger of war had meant anything, what did
this mean?

So the President's address to the Senate on Jan. 22 did not and could
not have the reception that he hoped. He set forth his idea of the
necessity of a League of Nations, he declared that the peace must be
based on democratic principles and on the doctrine that was to become
famous before long under the name of self-determination. There must be
no more forcible conquests, no more bartering of unwilling populations.
The peace that ended this war, he said, must be guaranteed by a League
of Nations--of all nations; and if America was to enter that League she
must be assured that the peace was a peace worth guaranteeing.

So far every one might have followed him, in America at least; but the
President called such a peace a "peace without victory," and to the
supporters of the Allies in America, rendered suspicious by a course
whose motives they could not see, that meant a peace without allied
victory and consequently an unjust peace. Few of the President's public
addresses have been more unfavorably received.

Wilson had stated his peace terms--of course, only in general
principles; the Allies had stated theirs in detail. Except for an
article in a New York evening newspaper, inspired by Bernstorff but
bearing no mark of authority, the German terms had not even been
suggested. On the day following his Senate speech, according to
Bernstorff, the President volunteered to issue a call for an immediate
peace conference if only the Germans would state their terms. But they
did not state them until the 29th, when a note for the President's
private information detailed a program which was as obviously
unacceptable to the allied powers as the Allies' terms were to the
Germans. In any case this program had only an academic interest, for
along with it came a formal notice that unrestricted submarine war
would begin on Feb. 1.

The German Government had deliberately broken its promises of Sept. 1,
1915, and May 5, 1916. Moreover, that Gove