To my letter of December 23 with its enclosed memoranda I never received a reply or even an acknowledgment.  It is true that the day following its delivery the President went to Chaumont to spend Christmas at the headquarters of General Pershing and that almost immediately thereafter he visited London and two or three days after his return to Paris he set out for Rome.  It is possible that Mr. Wilson in the midst of these crowded days had no time to digest or even to read my letter and its enclosed memoranda.  It is possible that he was unable or unwilling to form an opinion as to their merits without time for meditation.  I do not wish to be unjustly critical or to blame the President for a neglect which was the result of circumstance rather than of intention.

At the time I assumed that his failure to mention my letter in any way was because his visits to royalty exacted from him so much of his time that there was no opportunity to give the matter consideration.  While some doubt was thrown on this assumption by the fact that the President held an hour’s conference with the American Commissioners on January 1, just before departing for Italy, during which he discussed the favorable attitude of Mr. Lloyd George toward his (the President’s) ideas as to a League of Nations, but never made any reference to my proposed substitute for the guaranty, I was still disposed to believe that there was a reasonable explanation for his silence and that upon his return from Rome he would discuss it.

Having this expectation I continued the preparation of tentative provisions to be included in the charter of a League of Nations in the event one was negotiated, and which would in any event constitute a guide for the preparation of declarations to be included in the Treaty of Peace in case the negotiation as to a League was postponed until after peace had been restored.  As has been said, it was my hope that there would be a separate convention organizing the League, but I was not as sanguine of this as many who believed this course would be followed.

It later developed that the President never had any other purpose than to include the detailed plan of organization in the peace treaty, whether the treaty was preliminary or definitive.  When he departed for Italy he had not declared this purpose to the Commissioners, but from some source, which I failed to note at the time and cannot now recollect, I gained the impression that he intended to pursue this policy, for on December 29 I wrote in my book of notes: 

“It is evident that the President is determined to incorporate in the peace treaty an elaborate scheme for the League of Nations which will excite all sorts of opposition at home and abroad and invite much discussion.

“The articles relating to the League ought to be few and brief.  They will not be.  They will be many and long.  If we wait till they are accepted, it will be four or five months before