“The League of Nations created by the Treaty is relied upon to preserve the artificial structure which has been erected by compromise of the conflicting interests of the Great Powers and to prevent the germination of the seeds of war which are sown in so many articles and which under normal conditions would soon bear fruit.  The League might as well attempt to prevent the growth of plant life in a tropical jungle.  Wars will come sooner or later.

“It must be admitted in honesty that the League is an instrument of the mighty to check the normal growth of national power and national aspirations among those who have been rendered impotent by defeat.  Examine the Treaty and you will find peoples delivered against their wills into the hands of those whom they hate, while their economic resources are torn from them and given to others.  Resentment and bitterness, if not desperation, are bound to be the consequences of such provisions.  It may be years before these oppressed peoples are able to throw off the yoke, but as sure as day follows night the time will come when they will make the effort.

“This war was fought by the United States to destroy forever the conditions which produced it.  Those conditions have not been destroyed.  They have been supplanted by other conditions equally productive of hatred, jealousy, and suspicion.  In place of the Triple Alliance and the Entente has arisen the Quintuple Alliance which is to rule the world.  The victors in this war intend to impose their combined will upon the vanquished and to subordinate all interests to their own.

“It is true that to please the aroused public opinion of mankind and to respond to the idealism of the moralist they have surrounded the new alliance with a halo and called it ‘The League of Nations,’ but whatever it may be called or however it may be disguised it is an alliance of the Five Great Military Powers.

“It is useless to close our eyes to the fact that the power to compel obedience by the exercise of the united strength of ‘The Five’ is the fundamental principle of the League.  Justice is secondary.  Might is primary.

“The League as now constituted will be the prey of greed and intrigue; and the law of unanimity in the Council, which may offer a restraint, will be broken or render the organization powerless.  It is called upon to stamp as just what is unjust.

   “We have a treaty of peace, but it will not bring permanent peace
   because it is founded on the shifting sands of self-interest.”

In the views thus expressed I was not alone.  A few days after they were written I was in London where I discussed the Treaty with several of the leading British statesmen.  I noted their opinions thus:  “The consensus was that the Treaty was unwise and unworkable, that it was conceived in intrigue and fashioned in cupidity, and that it would produce rather than prevent wars.”  One of these leaders of political thought in Great Britain said that “the only apparent purpose of the League of Nations seems to be to perpetuate the series of unjust provisions which were being imposed.”