the bounds of legitimate criticism.  Motive is hardly ever visible, nor is it often deducible from deliberate action.  If, for example, one were to infer from the vast territorial readjustments and the still vaster demands of the various belligerents at the Conference, the motives that had determined them to enter the war, the conclusion—­except in the case of the American people, whose disinterestedness is beyond the reach of cavil—­would indeed be distressing.  The President of the United States merited well of all nations by holding up to them an ideal for realization, and the mere announcement of his resolve to work for it imparted an appreciable if inadequate incentive to men of good-will.  The task, however, was so gigantic that he cannot have gaged its magnitude, discerned the defects of the instruments, nor estimated aright the force of the hindrances before taking the world to witness that he would achieve it.  Even with the hearty co-operation of ardent colleagues and the adoption of a sound method he could hardly have hoped to do more than clear the ground—­perhaps lay the foundation-stone—­of the structure he dreamt of.  But with the partners whom circumstance allotted him, and the gainsayers whom he had raised up and irritated in his own country, failure was a foregone conclusion from the first.  The aims after which most of the European governments strove were sheer incompatible with his own.  Doubtless they all were solicitous about the general good, but their love for it was so general and so diluted with attachment to others’ goods as to be hardly discernible.  The reproach that can hardly be spared to Mr. Wilson, however, is that of pusillanimity.  If his faith in the principles he had laid down for the guidance of nations were as intense as his eloquent words suggested, he would have spurned the offer of a sequence of high-sounding phrases in lieu of a resettlement of the world.  And his appeal to the peoples would most probably have been heard.  The beacon once lighted in Paris would have been answered in almost every capital of the world.  One promise he kept religiously:  he did not return to Washington without a paper covenant.  Is it more?  Is it merely a paradox to assert that as war was waged in order to make war impossible, so a peace was made that will render peace impossible?

FOOTNOTES: 

[91] In March.

[92] Quoted by The Chicago Tribune (Paris edition), August 10, 1919.

[93] Delivered at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York on March 4, 1919.

[94] The New York Herald, March 19, 1919 (Paris edition).

[95] Cf. The New York Herald, July 8, 1919.

[96] The semi-official journals manifested a steady tendency to lean toward the Republican opposition in the United States, down to the month of August, when the amendments proposed by various Senators bade fair to jeopardize the Treaties and render the promised military succor doubtful.