As indicated by the caption, this document was intended merely "for discussion" of the principal features of the organization. It should be noted that the basic principle is the equality of nations. No special privileges are granted to the major powers in the conduct of the organization. The rights and obligations of one member of the League are no more and no less than those of every other member. It is based on international democracy and denies international aristocracy.
Equality in the exercise of sovereign rights in times of peace, an equality which is imposed by the very nature of sovereignty, seemed to me fundamental to a world organization affecting in any way a nation's independence of action or its exercise of supreme authority over its external or domestic affairs. In my judgment any departure from that principle would be a serious error fraught with danger to the general peace of the world and to the recognized law of nations, since it could mean nothing less than the primacy of the Great Powers and the acknowledgment that because they possessed the physical might they had a right to control the affairs of the world in times of peace as well as in times of war. For the United States to admit that such primacy ought to be formed would be bad enough, but to suggest it indirectly by proposing an international organization based on that idea would be far worse.
On January 22, 1917, the President in an address to the Senate had made the following declaration:
"The equality of nations upon which peace must be founded if it is to last must be an equality of rights; the guarantees exchanged must neither recognize nor imply a difference between big nations or small, between those that are powerful and those that are weak. Right must be based upon the common strength, not the individual strength, of the nations upon whose concert peace will depend. Equality of territory or of resources there of course cannot be; nor any other sort of equality not gained in the ordinary peaceful and legitimate development of the peoples themselves. But no one asks or expects anything more than an equality of rights."
In view of this sound declaration of principle it seemed hardly possible that the President, after careful consideration of the consequences of his plan of a guaranty requiring force to make it practical, would not perceive the fundamental error of creating a primacy of the Great Powers.
It was in order to prevent, if possible, the United States from becoming sponsor for an undemocratic principle that I determined to lay my partial plan of organization before the President at the earliest moment that I believed it would receive consideration.
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: