“The Allied Governments have accepted the bases of peace which I outlined to the Congress on the 8th of January last, as the Central Empires also have, and very reasonably desire my personal counsel in their interpretation and application, and it is highly desirable that I should give it in order that the sincere desire of our government to contribute without selfish aims of any kind to settlements that will be of common benefit to all the nations concerned may be fully manifest.”
In an interview printed in the Paris “Temps” of March 25, 1919, Count Bernstorff, former Ambassador to the United States, said:
“The armistice of November 11 was signed when all the Powers interested had accepted the program of peace proposed by President Wilson. Germany is determined to keep to this agreement, which history will regard, in a way, as the conclusion of a preliminary peace. She herself is ready to submit to the conditions arising from it, and she expects all the interested Powers to do the same.”
The President’s reversal was diplomatically covered under various specious pretexts by the staff of English journalists at the peace conference. Sir J. Foster Frazer put it this way: “Mr. Wilsonhas broadened in vision since he came to Paris. He has abandoned his purely national point of view.”
The same writer discoursed entertainingly of the methods pursued in the conference. “Except at intervals,” he wrote, “the conferences are not in public, that is when a certain number of journalists are permitted to be present. The great things are debated in private, and at these private conversations in M. Pichon’s room at the French Foreign Office, the full representation of the five powers is not in attendance.... The full conferences of the seventy delegates will have but little option but to acquiesce with the conclusion of the ten.... It is a perfectly open secret that the three men who are ‘running the show’ are M. Clemenceau, Mr. Wilson and Mr. Lloyd George.”
The noble writer frankly admits that the conferences revolved around the secret treaties among the Allies instead of the Fourteen Points. He reports:
“We already know there were three secret treaties made during the war and to all of which Great Britain was a party; (1) conceding to Italy the Dalmatian coast in return for her help, (2) the concession of the former German islands in the North Pacific to Japan, (3) the promise of Damascus to the King of Hedjaz.”
Again he says: “Japan is in possession of the Marshall and Caroline groups of islands in the Pacific, and has a document signed by both France and Britain that she shall retain them.”
So much for “open covenants openly arrived at,” though they do not cover all the secret pacts which determined the conditions of peace.
Only once Mr. Wilson rose to the importance of his mission, when he declared that Fiume must go to the Jugo-Slav Republic. His announcement was soon followed by an invasion of Fiume under d’Annunzio, the Italian poet-patriot, with the apparent secret connivance of our associates in the war.