printed
draft of the President's Covenant, but which I believe were added to the
typewritten draft after the President had examined the plan of the South
African statesman:

"As successor to the Empires, the League of Nations is empowered,
directly and without right of delegation, to watch over the relations
_inter se_ of all new independent states arising or created out of
the Empires, and shall assume and fulfill the duty of conciliating
and composing differences between them with a view to the maintenance
of settled order and the general peace."

There is a natural temptation to a student of international agreements
to analyze critically the composition and language of this provision,
but to do so would in no way advance the consideration of the subject
under discussion and would probably be interpreted as a criticism of the
President's skill in accurately expressing his thoughts, a criticism
which it is not my purpose to make.

Mr. Wilson's draft also contained a system of mandates over territories
in a form which was, to say the least, rudimentary if not inadequate. By
the proposed system the League of Nations, as "the residuary trustee,"
was to take sovereignty over "the peoples and territories" of the
defeated Empires and to issue a mandate to some power or powers to
exercise such sovereignty. A "residuary trustee" was a novelty in
international relations sufficient to arouse conjecture as to its
meaning, but giving to the League the character of an independent state
with the capacity of possessing sovereignty and the power to exercise
sovereign rights through a designated agent was even more extraordinary.
This departure from the long accepted idea of the essentials of
statehood seemed to me an inexpedient and to a degree a dangerous
adventure. The only plausible excuse for the proposal seemed to be a
lack of knowledge as to the nature of sovereignty and as to the
attributes inherent in the very conception of a state. The character of
a mandate, a mandatory, and the authority issuing the mandate presented
many legal perplexities which certainly required very careful study
before the experiment was tried. Until the system was fully worked out
and the problems of practical operation were solved, it seemed to me
unwise to suggest it and still more unwise to adopt it. While the
general idea of mandates issuing from the proposed international
organization was presumably acceptable to the Presiden