strian internal problems, for instance, proposed a solution which the
Austrian Government had rejected only a few weeks before, and which the
Austrian subject nationalities would no longer have been willing to
accept

Whatever the origin of the Fourteen Points, their immediate effect was
slight. The Austrians, and to a lesser extent the Germans, professed
interest, but it was soon apparent that the Germans at least were not
ready to approach the allied point of view. And the Treaty of
Brest-Litovsk, forced upon Russia on March 3, was in such stark
contrast with the benevolent professions of German statesmen that the
President realized that nothing could be gained by debate and
compromise. On April 6, in a speech at Baltimore, he declared that only
one argument was now of use against the Germans--"force to the utmost,
force without stint or limit." The process of conversion from the
viewpoint of January, 1917, was complete.

As a matter of fact, however, the application of force had already
begun. On March 21 Ludendorff had opened his great offensive in France
which was to bring the war to a German victory, and for the next few
months Foch, and not Wilson, was the dominant personality among the
Allies. And for a time it seemed that however much America had
contributed to the moral struggle between the alliances, she would be
able to furnish comparatively little force. The winter of 1917-18 had
been full of humiliations. The railroad disorganization which had led
to the proclamation of Government control at the end of December was
being cleared up only slowly. The Fuel Administration was in an even
worse tangle, and in January business and industry had to shut down for
several days throughout the whole Eastern part of the country in order
to find coal to move food trains to the ports. Great sums of money and
enormous volumes of boasting had been expended on airplane construction
without getting any airplanes. Hundreds of millions had been poured
into shipyards and ships were only beginning to come from the ways. The
richest nation in the world allowed hundreds of its soldiers to die in
cantonment hospitals because of insufficient attention and inadequate
supplies. Artillery regiments were being trained with wooden guns and
only 150,000 Americans, many of them technical troops, were in France.

The Secretary of War, called before a Congressional committee to answer
questions on these shortcomings, had created the impress