Mr. Wilson has fared ill with his critics, who, when in quest of explanations of his changeful courses, sought for them, as is the wont of the average politician, in the least noble parts of human nature. In his case they felt especially repelled by his imperial aloofness, the secrecy of his deliberations, and the magisterial tone of his judgments, even when these were in flagrant contradiction with one another. Obstinacy was also included among the traits which were commonly ascribed to him. As a matter of fact he was a very good listener, an intelligent questioner, and amenable to argument whenever he felt free to give practical effect to the conclusions. When this was not the case, arguments necessarily failed of their effect, and on these occasions considerations of expediency proved a lever sufficient to sway his decision. But, like his more distinguished colleagues, he had to rely upon counsel from outside, and in his case, as in theirs, the official adviser was not always identical with the real prompter. He, too, as we saw, set aside the findings of the commissions when they disagreed with his own. In a word, Mr. Wilson's fatal stumble was to have sacrificed essentials in order to score on issues of secondary moment; for while success enabled him to obtain his paper Covenant from his co-delegates in Paris, and to bring back tangible results to Washington, it lost him the leadership of the world. The cost of this deplorable weakness to mankind can be estimated only after its worst effects have been added up and appraised.
In matters affecting the destinies of the lesser states Mr. Wilson was firm as a rock. Prom the position once taken up nothing could move him. Their economic dependence on his own country rendered their arguments pointless and lent irresistible force to his injunctions. Greece's dispute with Bulgaria was a classic instance. The Bulgars repaired to Paris more as claimants in support of indefeasible rights than as vanquished enemies summoned to learn the conditions imposed on them by the nations which they had betrayed and assailed. Victory alone could have justified their territorial pretensions; defeat made them grotesque. All at once, however, it was bruited abroad that President Wilson had become Bulgaria's intercessor and favored certain of her exorbitant claims. One of these was for the annexation of part of the coast of western Thrace, together with a seaport at the expense of the Greeks, the race which had resided on the seaboard for twenty-five hundred consecutive years. M. Venizelos offered them instead one commercial outlet[118] and special privileges in another, and the plenipotentiaries of Great Britain, France, and Japan considered the offer adequate.
But Mr. Wilson demurred. A commercial outlet through foreign territory, he said, might possibly be as good as a direct outlet through one's own territory in peace-time, but not in time of war, and, after all, one must bear in mind the needs of a country during hostilities. In the mouth of the champion of universal peace that was an unexpected argument. It had been employed by Italy in favor of her claim to Fiume. Mr. Wilson then met it by invoking the economic requirements of Jugoslavia, and by declaring that the Treaty was being devised for peace, not for war, that the League of Nations would hinder wars, or at the very least supply the deficiencies of those states which had sacrificed strategical positions for humanitarian aims. But in the case of Bulgaria he was taking what seems the opposite position and transgressing his own principle of nationality in order to maintain it.
Mr. Wilson, pursuing his line of argument, further pointed out that the Supreme Council had not accepted as sufficient for Poland an outlet through German territory, but had created the city-state of Dantzig in order to confer a greater degree of security upon the Polish republic. To that M. Venizelos replied that there was no parity between the two instances. Poland had no outlet to the sea except through Dantzig, and could not, therefore, allow that one to remain in the hands of an unfriendly nation, whereas Bulgaria already possessed two very commodious ports, Varna and Burgas, on the Black Sea, which becomes a free sea in virtue of the internationalization of the straits. The possession of a third outlet on the Ægean could not, therefore, be termed a vital question for his protégée. Thus the comparison with Poland was irrelevant.
If Poland, which is a very much greater state than Bulgaria, can live and prosper with a single port, and that not her own—if Rumania, which is also a much more numerous and powerful nation, can thrive with a single issue to the sea, by what line of argument, M. Venizelos asked, can one prove that little Bulgaria requires three or four exits, and that her need justifies the abandonment to her tender mercies of seven hundred and fifty thousand Greeks and the violation of one of the fundamental principles underlying the new moral ordering.
Compliance with Bulgaria's demand would prevent Greece from including within her boundaries the three-quarters of a million Greeks who have dwelt in Thrace for twenty-five centuries, preserving their nationality intact through countless disasters and tremendous cataclysms. Further, the Greek Premier, taking a leaf from Wilson's book, turned to the aspect which the problem would assume in war-time. Bulgaria, he argued, is essentially a continental state, whose defense does not depend upon naval strength, whereas Greece contains an island population of nearly a million and a half and looks for protection against aggression chiefly to naval precautions. In case of war, Bulgaria, if her claim to an issue on the Ægean were allowed, could with her submarines delay or hinder the transport and concentration in Macedonia of Greek forces from the islands and thus place Greece in a position of dangerous inferiority.
Lastly, if Greece's claims in Thrace were rejected, she would have a population of 1,790,000 souls outside her national boundaries—that is to say, more than one-third of the population which is within her state. Would this be fair? Of the total population of Bulgarian and Turkish Thrace the Turks and Greeks together form 85 per cent., the Bulgars only 6 per cent., and the latter nowhere in compact masses. Moreover—and this ought to have clinched the matter—the Hellenic population formed an absolute as well as a relative majority in the year 1919.
These arguments and various other considerations drawn from the inordinate ambitions, the savage cruelty,[119] and the Punic faith of the Bulgars convinced the British, French, and Japanese delegates of the soundness of Greece's pleas, and they sided with M. Venizelos. But Mr. Wilson clung to his idea with a tenacity which could not be justified by argument, and was concurrently explained by motives irrelevant to the merits of the case. Whether the influence of Bulgarophil American missionaries and strong religious leanings were at the root of his insistence, as was generally assumed, or whether other considerations weighed with him, is immaterial. And yet it is worth recording that a Bulgarian journal[120] announced with the permission of the governmental censor that the American missionaries in Bulgaria and the professors of Robert College of Constantinople had so primed the American delegates at the Conference on the question of Thrace, and generally on the Bulgarian problem, that all M. Venizelos's pains to convince them of the justice of his contention would be lost labor."[121]
However this may be, Mr. Wilson's attitude was the subject of adverse comment throughout Europe. His implied claim to legislate for the world and to take over its moral leadership earned for him the epithet of "Dictator," and provoked such epigrammatic comments among his own countrymen and the French as this: "Louis XIV said, 'I am the state!' Mr. Wilson, outdoing him, exclaimed, 'I am all the states!'"
The necessity of winning over dissentient colleagues to his grandiose scheme of world reorganization and of satisfying their demands, which were of a nature to render that scheme abortive, was the most influential agency in impairing his energies and upsetting his plans. This remark assumes what unhappily seems a fact, that those plans were mainly mechanical. It is certain that they made no provision for directly influencing the masses, for giving them sympathetic guidance, and enabling them to suffuse with social sentiments the aspirations and strivings which were chiefly of the materialistic order, with a view to bringing about a spiritual transformation of the social basis. Indeed we have no evidence that the need of such a transformation of the basis of political thought, which was still rooted in the old order, was grasped by any of those who set their hand to the legislative part of the work.