of this sort would be of little value unless supported by the threatened, and, if necessary, the actual, employment of force.  The President was entirely logical in this attitude.  A guaranty against physical aggression would be practically worthless if it did not rest on an agreement to protect with physical force.  An undertaking to protect carried with it the idea of using effectual measures to insure protection.  They were inseparable; and the President, having adopted an affirmative guaranty against aggression as a cardinal provision—­perhaps I should say the cardinal provision—­of the anticipated peace treaty, could not avoid becoming the advocate of the use of force in making good the guaranty.

During the year 1918 the general idea of the formation of an international organization to prevent war was increasingly discussed in the press of the United States and Europe and engaged the thought of the Governments of the Powers at war with the German Empire.  On January 8 of that year President Wilson in an address to Congress proclaimed his “Fourteen Points,” the adoption of which he considered necessary to a just and stable peace.  The last of these “Points” explicitly states the basis of the proposed international organization and the fundamental reason for its formation.  It is as follows: 

“XIV.  A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”

This declaration may be considered in view of subsequent developments to be a sufficiently clear announcement of the President’s theory as to the plan of organization which ought to be adopted, but at the time the exact character of the “mutual guarantees” was not disclosed and aroused little comment.  I do not believe that Congress, much less the public at large, understood the purpose that the President had in mind.  Undoubtedly, too, a sense of loyalty to the Chief Executive, while the war was in progress, and the desire to avoid giving comfort of any sort to the enemy, prevented a critical discussion of the announced bases of peace, some of which were at the time academic, premature, and liable to modification if conditions changed.

In March Lord Phillimore and his colleagues made their preliminary report to the British Government on “a League of Nations” and this was followed in July by their final report, copies of which reached the President soon after they were made.  The time had arrived for putting into concrete form the general ideas that the President held, and Colonel House, whom some believed to be the real author of Mr. Wilson’s conception of a world union, prepared, I am informed, the draft of a scheme of organization.  This draft was either sent or handed to the President and discussed with him.  To what extent it was amended or revised by Mr. Wilson I do not know, but in a modified form it became the typewritten draft of the Covenant which he took with him to Paris, where it underwent several changes.  In it was the guaranty of 1915, 1916, 1917, and 1918, which, from the form in which it appeared, logically required the use of force to give it effect.