Wilson's plan tends to that end. We have seen that it is not new, but it is great. Among others, Sully and Henry IV, the Abbé Saint-Pierre and Rousseau, cherished this idea, which Voltaire, the skeptic, considered chimerical. Kant, the philosopher, used to say: "What we desire is a General Congress of Nations, the convening and duration of which would depend entirely upon the sovereign will of the several members of the league."
The lineage of statesmen, of dreamers, and of philosophers is a single and privileged moral descent. Prudent forethought, creative imagination and profound grasp of the supreme laws which regulate nature and man are crystallized in the souls of liberators. Bolívar also strove to establish an Assembly of Nations at the Isthmus of Panama. And it is worthy of notice that these nations in Bolívar's plan, as well as in the Covenant of the League of Nations, would be forced to obey the principles of International Law. The Congress, in his first project, was intended to be established somewhat rigidly, and, in that, too, Bolívar anticipated the ennobling of an idea, fostered by modern writers like Blunstchli, Dudley Field, Fiore, Pessoa (now President of Brazil), and which has been the subject of numerous international conferences.
What deep sadness must our great liberator have felt when in figurative language he compared his ineffective plan for a congress with the insane Greek of old who thought that standing on a rock, he could steer the ships passing on the sea!
The immediate genesis of the Covenant of the League of Nations is found in the famous Fourteen Points of President Wilson.
Some of them follow:
In the first, President Wilson proposes international agreements of peace entered into frankly and openly, and the obligation of proscribing secret international agreements of any kind in the future.
In the second, he proposes the freedom of the seas in time of peace as well as in time of war, exclusive both of territorial waters and of seas which may be closed by international action with the purpose of carrying out international agreements.
In the third, he proposes the suppression, as far as possible, of economic barriers, and the establishment of equal commercial conditions for the states which would accept the peace and join to maintain it.
In the fourth, he proposes the reduction of armaments to the minimum limit compatible with the internal safety of each country.
Lastly, in the fourteenth, he proposes the creation of a General Society of Nations to guarantee the territorial integrity and the political independence of the small as well as of the large states.