As indicated by the caption, this document was intended merely “for discussion” of the principal features of the organization.  It should be noted that the basic principle is the equality of nations.  No special privileges are granted to the major powers in the conduct of the organization.  The rights and obligations of one member of the League are no more and no less than those of every other member.  It is based on international democracy and denies international aristocracy.

Equality in the exercise of sovereign rights in times of peace, an equality which is imposed by the very nature of sovereignty, seemed to me fundamental to a world organization affecting in any way a nation’s independence of action or its exercise of supreme authority over its external or domestic affairs.  In my judgment any departure from that principle would be a serious error fraught with danger to the general peace of the world and to the recognized law of nations, since it could mean nothing less than the primacy of the Great Powers and the acknowledgment that because they possessed the physical might they had a right to control the affairs of the world in times of peace as well as in times of war.  For the United States to admit that such primacy ought to be formed would be bad enough, but to suggest it indirectly by proposing an international organization based on that idea would be far worse.

On January 22, 1917, the President in an address to the Senate had made the following declaration: 

“The equality of nations upon which peace must be founded if it is to last must be an equality of rights; the guarantees exchanged must neither recognize nor imply a difference between big nations or small, between those that are powerful and those that are weak.  Right must be based upon the common strength, not the individual strength, of the nations upon whose concert peace will depend.  Equality of territory or of resources there of course cannot be; nor any other sort of equality not gained in the ordinary peaceful and legitimate development of the peoples themselves.  But no one asks or expects anything more than an equality of rights.”

In view of this sound declaration of principle it seemed hardly possible that the President, after careful consideration of the consequences of his plan of a guaranty requiring force to make it practical, would not perceive the fundamental error of creating a primacy of the Great Powers.

It was in order to prevent, if possible, the United States from becoming sponsor for an undemocratic principle that I determined to lay my partial plan of organization before the President at the earliest moment that I believed it would receive consideration.