gment on the
peace itself, revising its terms when revision became necessary and
possible, slowly readjusting the provisions of the treaty to a calmer
and saner state of public mind. Get peace first. Establish the League,
and the League would rectify the inevitable mistakes of the treaty.

It is a curious commentary on human nature that when the treaty was
completed and the storm of wrath broke, all the rage, all the
resentment, all the odium should have fallen on the one man who had
struggled week in and week out against the forces of reaction and
revenge and had written into the treaty all that it contains which
makes for the international advancement of the race.

_Why The Treaty Was Beaten_

Into that record must also go the impressive fact that the Treaty of
Versailles was rejected by the United States Senate, under the
leadership of Henry Cabot Lodge, not because of its acknowledged
defects and shortcomings, not because it breathed the spirit of a
Carthaginian peace in its punitive clauses, but because of its most
enlightened provision, the covenant of the League of Nations, which is
the one hope of a war-racked world.

When people speak of the tragedy of Mr. Wilson's career they have in
mind only the temporary aspects of it--the universal dissatisfaction
with the treaty of peace, his physical collapse, his defeat in the
Senate and the verdict at the polls in November. They forget that the
end of the chapter is not yet written. The League of Nations is a fact,
whatever the attitude of the United States may be toward it, and it
will live unless the peoples of the earth prove their political
incapacity to use it for the promotion of their own welfare. The
principle of self-determination will remain as long as men believe in
the right of self-government and are willing to die for it. It was
Woodrow Wilson who wrote that principle into the law of nations, even
though he failed to obtain a universal application of it. Tacitus said
of the Catti tribesmen, "Others go to battle; these go to war," and Mr.
Wilson went to war in behalf of the democratic theory of government
extended to all the affairs of the nations. That war is not yet won,
and the Commander in Chief is crippled by the wounds that he received
on the field of action. But the responsibility for the future does not
rest with him. It rests with the self-governing peoples for whom he has
blazed the trail. All the complicated issues of this titanic struggle