"It has been one of the many distressing revelations of recent years that the great Power which has just been happily defeated put intolerable burdens and injustice upon the helpless peoples of some of the colonies which it annexed to itself, that its interest was rather their extermination than their development, that the desire was to possess their land for European purposes and not to enjoy their confidence in order that mankind might be lifted in these places to the next higher level.
"Now the world, expressing its conscience in law, says there is an end of that, that our consciences shall be settled to this thing. States will be picked out which have shown that they can exercise a conscience in this matter and under their tutelage the helpless peoples of the world will come into a new light and into a new hope.
"So I think that I can say of this document that it is at one and the same time a practical document, a human document. There is a pulse of sympathy in it. There is a compulsion of conscience throughout it. It is practical, and yet it is intended to purify, to rectify, to elevate.
"It was in one sense, said Mr. Wilson, a belated document, for he believed the conscience of the world had long been prepared to express itself in some such way.
"We are not just now discovering our sympathy for these peoples and our interest in them. We are simply expressing it, for it has long been felt and in the administration of the affairs of more than one of the great states represented here—so far as I know all of the great states that are represented here—that humane impulse has already expressed itself in their dealings with their colonies whose peoples were yet at a low stage of civilization.
... "Many terrible things have come out of this war, gentlemen, but some very beautiful things have come out of it. Wrong has been defeated, but the rest of the world has been more conscious than it ever was before of the majority of right. People that were suspicious of each other can now live as friends and comrades in a single family, and desire to do so. The miasma of distrust, of intrigue is cleared away. Men are looking eye to eye and saying: 'We are brothers, and have a common purpose. We did not realize it before, but now we do realize it, and this is our covenant of friendship.'"
After notifying by cable the Congressional Committee on Foreign Affairs at Washington, that he would return to America and confer with them at the White House, President Wilson sailed from Brest for home on February 15, 1919. Greeted at Boston by a great multitude of enthusiastic citizens, he delivered an address in the afternoon to 7,000 people assembled in Mechanic Hall on the subject of the League of Nations. Traversing much of the ground he had covered in his speech on the draft of the League in Paris, Mr. Wilson said he had been impressed with the wonderful fact during his work at the Peace Conference that there was no nation in Europe that suspected the motives of the United States....
"Before this war, Europe did not believe in us as she does now. She did not believe in us during the first three years of the war. She seems to have believed that we were holding off because we thought we could make more by staying out than by going in. And, all of a sudden, in a short eighteen months, the whole verdict is reversed.... They saw what we did—that, without making a single claim, we put all our men and all our means at the disposal of those who were fighting for their homes, in the first instance, but for a cause, the cause of human rights and justice, and that we went in, not to support their national claims, but to support the great cause which they held in common. And when they saw that not only America held ideas, but acted ideals, they were converted to America and became firm partisans of those ideals....
"And now do you realize that this confidence which we have established throughout the world imposes a burden upon us, if you choose to call it a burden? It is one of those burdens which any nation should be proud to carry."
President Wilson said that all the peoples of Europe were buoyed up with a new hope, that they believed a new age was dawning, when nations would understand each other and support each other in every just cause and unite every moral and physical strength to see that right should prevail. "If America were at this juncture to fail the world, what would become of it?" He dwelt on the despair and bitterness that would follow if America failed to justify the world's hope; on the return to the old bad conditions that had prevailed before the war when all European nations were hostile camps.