nations themselves, all of which were still
confident of victory. Specifically, to offer mediation during the
course of the Presidential election would have been to drive over to
Hughes all the pro-Ally elements in America, which in the state of mind
of 1916 would have seen in such a proposal only a helping hand extended
to a Germany whose cause was otherwise hopeless.

So, though during 1916 the President would have welcomed a request for
mediation, he did not dare suggest it on his own account. And neither
side dared to propose it, for such a request would have been taken as
an admission of defeat. Nineteen hundred and sixteen was an indecisive
year, but the fortune of war gave now one side and now the other the
conviction that a few months more would bring it to complete victory.
In such circumstances the losers dared not make a proposal which would
hearten their enemies and the victors would not suggest the stopping of
the war when they hoped that a few months more would see them in a much
more favorable position.

_A Sympathetic Tribute_

_Hamilton Holt, head of a delegation that visited the White House
on October 27, 1920, in connection with the campaign advocating our
entry into the League of Nations, said in the course of his address
to President Wilson:_

_"It was you who first focused the heterogeneous and often diverse
aims of the war on the one ideal of pure Americanism, which is
democracy. It was you who suggested the basis on which peace was
negotiated. It was you, more than any man, who translated into
practical statesmanship the age-old dream of the poets, the
prophets and the philosophers by setting up a league of nations to
the end that cooperation could be substituted for competition in
international affairs._

_"These acts of statesmanship were undoubtedly the chief factors
which brought about that victorious peace which has shorn Germany
of her power to subdue her neighbors, has compelled her to make
restitution for her crimes, has freed oppressed peoples, has
restored ravaged territories, has created new democracies in the
likeness of the United States, and above all has set up the League
of Nations."_

But by December Germany's situation was more fortunate than at any time
since the early Summer. Rumania, which had come into the war three
months before, had been defeated and overrun in a spectacular campaig