Misfortunes did not come singly in Mr. Wilson's case. Following the mistake of appealing for the election of a Democratic Congress he made an equally serious mistake in the selection of his Peace Commission.
To anybody who knows Mr. Wilson, who knows Mr. Lloyd George, who knows Mr. Clemenceau, nothing could be sillier than the chapters of Keynes and Dillon in which they undertake to picture the President's unfitness to cope with the European masters of diplomacy. Mr. Wilson for years had been playing with European masters of diplomacy as a cat plays with a mouse. To assume that Mr. Wilson was ever deceived by the transparent tactics of Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Clemenceau is to assume the impossible. It would be as easy to conceive of his being tricked and bamboozled by the United States Senate.
The Peace Commission
Mr. Wilson needed strong Republican representation on the Peace Commission not to reinforce him in his struggles with his adversaries at Paris but to divide with him the responsibility for a treaty of peace that was doomed in advance to be a disappointment. Although the popular sentiment of Europe was almost passionate in its advocacy of President Wilson's peace program, all the special interests that were seeking to capitalize the peace for their own advantage or profit were actively at work and were beginning to swing all the influence that they could command on their various Governments. It was inevitable from the outset that Mr. Wilson could never get the peace that he had expected. The treaty was bound to be a series of compromises that would satisfy nobody, and when Mr. Wilson assumed all the responsibility for it in advance he assumed a responsibility that no stateman who had ever lived could carry alone. Had he taken Mr. Root or Mr. Taft or both of them with him the terms of the Treaty of Versailles might have been no different, but the Senate would have been robbed of the partisan grievance on which it organized the defeat of ratification.
Day after day during the conference Mr. Wilson fought the fight for a peace that represented the liberal thought of the world. Day after day the odds against him lengthened. The contest finally resolved itself into a question of whether he should take what he could get or whether he should withdraw from the conference and throw the doors open to chaos. The President made the only decision that he had a moral right to make. He took what he could get, nor are the statesmen with whom he was associated altogether to blame because he did not get more. They too had to contend against forces over which they had no control. They were not free agents either, and Mr. Smuts has summed up the case in two sentences:
It was not the statesmen that failed so much as the spirit of the peoples behind them. The hope, the aspiration, for a new world order of peace and right and justice, however deeply and universally felt, was still only feeble and ineffective in comparison with the dominant national passions which found their expression in the peace treaty.
All the passions and hatreds bred of four years of merciless warfare, all the insatiable fury for revenge, all the racial ambitions that had been twisted and perverted by centuries of devious diplomacy—these were all gathered around the council table, clamorous in their demand to dictate the terms.
Mr. Wilson surrendered more than he dreamed he was surrendering, but it is not difficult to follow his line of reasoning. The League of Nations was to be a continuing court of equity, sitting in judgment on the peace itself, revising its terms when revision became necessary and possible, slowly readjusting the provisions of the treaty to a calmer and saner state of public mind. Get peace first. Establish the League, and the League would rectify the inevitable mistakes of the treaty.
It is a curious commentary on human nature that when the treaty was completed and the storm of wrath broke, all the rage, all the resentment, all the odium should have fallen on the one man who had struggled week in and week out against the forces of reaction and revenge and had written into the treaty all that it contains which makes for the international advancement of the race.
Why The Treaty Was Beaten