to bring back the President to his better self, Mr. Wilson, a few hours after the letter reached him, betrayed China by consenting to the Japanese claims. Mr. Lansing heard the news after it had been given to the press. He wrote in his diary:

I do not think that anything that has happened here has caused more severe and outspoken criticism than this affair. I am heartsick over it, because I see how much good will and regard the President is bound to lose. I can offer no adequate explanation to the critics. There seems to be none.

§ 5

From the first week of May, when the original plans of the treaty were handed to the Germans, to the last week of June, when the Germans were compelled to sign the treaty under a threat of a renewal of the war, there was plenty of time to modify its terms, and especially to avoid repeating in the Treaty of St.-Germain some of the absurd and inhuman stipulations of the Treaty of Versailles. Changes that would have made the treaty practicable were advocated by the British. Mr. Maynard Keynes told us last year that Mr. Wilson, and not Mr. Lloyd George, sided with M. Clemenceau in maintaining certain features of the treaty which no soberminded man believed could be carried out without plunging Europe into chaos. Three of the five British plenipotentiaries told me during the last fortnight of May what Mr. Keynes later wrote. The British had imperative diplomatic reasons for not opposing France single-handed. They were bewildered by the inexplicable stubbornness of the American President, who insisted upon retaining in

the treaty clauses that the American delegation had delegation had opposed from the beginning of the conference clauses embodying conditions at total variance with his own famous Fourteen Points.

Colonel House's group of experts and advisers, in their reviews of the books of Mr. Keynes and Dr. Dillon, in their own books and articles and speeches, have assumed that the Treaty of Versailles is the right kind of treaty, or at least that it is the best treaty obtainable in the circumstances. They go so far as to assert that the treaty is in harmony with President Wilson's expression of American ideals, that it is humane, practicable, reasonable, and a distinct step forward toward a new world order and a durable world peace.

Even since the verdict of last November, these gentlemen have persisted in trying to call black white. They say that the American people were misled by politicians who, in turn, got their misconception of the league and their misinformation concerning the treaty from irresponsible press correspondents. One of them told me a few months ago that my denunciation of the Treaty of Versailles and opposition to the ratification of the League of Nations for two years in THE CENTURY was "a disheartening spectacle."

Before the peace conference ended I wrote from Paris to THE CENTURY that a number of liberal statesmen were disgusted with the treaty and believed that it would never amount to anything. At the time I was able to quote by name only General Smuts, who did not care who knew what he thought. Since then Mr. George Barnes has given his opinion for

history. Now we have Mr. Lansing declaring that he wrote in a memorandum on May 8, 1919, that

...

The terms of peace appear immeasurably harsh and humiliating, while many of them seem to me impossible of performance. . . . Examine the Treaty and you will find peoples delivered against their wills into the hands of those whom they hate, while their economic resources are torn from them and given to others. . . . It may be years before these suppressed peoples are able to throw off the yoke, but as sure as day follows night, the time will come when they will make the effort. This war was fought by the United States to destroy forever the conditions which produced it. Those conditions have not been destroyed. They have been supplanted by other conditions equally productive of hatred, jealousy, and suspicion. . . . The League of Nations . . . is an alliance of the five great military powers. tice is secondary. Might is primary. ... We have a treaty of peace, but it will not bring permanent peace because it is founded on the shifting sands of self-interest.

: Jus

Mr. Lansing's first impression, thus recorded, has strengthened with time, he tells us. Like General Smuts, Mr. Barnes and two of his own colleagues, Mr. Lansing signed the treaty because he thought that anything was better than continuing the state of war and blockade undermining the social structure of Europe. But he would have been more than human had he not let off steam. Mr. Lansing confesses that he took part in the frank exchanges of views in the Hôtel de Crillon and the Hôtel Majestic, and that he said less in criticism of the treaty to Mr. Bullitt than he did to some others. Mr. Bullitt, by an

The most interesting features of "The Peace Negotiations," the features that will be most quoted and discussed, are Mr. Lansing's portrait of Mr. Wilson and his repudiation of the achievements of the peace conference, Covenant of the League of Nations as well as the Treaty of Versailles. Mr. Keynes gave us a vivid portrait of the American President, based on rather superficial acquaintance, and a scathing criticism of the treaty from the point of view of an English Liberal. Mr. Lansing presents an intimate picture of a chief executive of the United States in his official relations with a secretary of state, and a judgment of the treaty and its covenant stipulations from the point of view of an American lawyer supposedly at the head of our foreign affairs.

But neither the portrayal of the personality of Mr. Wilson nor Mr. Lansing's ideas about the League of Nations is the most important feature of this book.

The thoughtful American reader will subordinate the personal side of the book and the discussion of the

league to the lesson impressed upon him on almost every page of "The Peace Negotiations" of the shocking lack of coöperation in the conduct of our foreign affairs between the White House and the State Department. It is beside the point to advance that Mr. Wilson was singularly arrogant and Mr. Lansing singularly meek. Whatever one might think about the willingness of a man to hold the position of secretary of state under such conditions, most readers will agree that Mr. Lansing, despite the provocation and humiliation, did right in sticking to his post during the peace conference and when the question of ratification was being threshed out in the Senate. As Mr. Lansing says, a split in the American delegation, following the dramatic departure of the Italians, would have given undue encouragement to Germany, and the dissident members of the commission were unwilling to take the responsibility of prolonging the war. What startles one is the revelation that such a situation is possible.

Mr. Lansing, careful lawyer, points out several times that he does not deny Mr. Wilson's constitutional right to act as he did before he went to Paris and at Paris. Treaty negotiating power is vested in the chief executive, and the President of the United States had the authority to do as Mr. Wilson did. He could go to Paris without consulting or getting the consent of any one. He could appoint whom he pleased as plenipotentiaries, and then let them remain figureheads. He could intrust unlimited authority to a man unknown in the United States, who had never held electoral office, and who was responsible only to himself. He could refuse to draw up a

program for the guidance of his associates and their subordinates, and there was nothing to compel him to take account either of the traditions or of the interests to the United States. The President could disregard the secretary of state, and refuse to receive advice or information from the State Department.

The student of constitutional history and international affairs thinks not of Mr. Wilson, with his peculiar characteristics and impaired health, but of any President of the United States, vested with the power of complete and uncontrolled exercise of treaty-negotiating functions. We are unique in democratic countries in this respect. We have no foreign policy that has entered into the national consciousness of the American people; so public opinion is no check upon the executive. We have no ministry of foreign affairs, with uninterrupted traditions and activities from administration to administration, whose inherited policies and self-functioning machinery limits the executive or sets him straight when he is inclined to follow a false path.

Of course, one may say, the last word is to the Senate. But the experiences through which we have passed and the mess we are in ought to demonstrate that the coördination in treaty-making power should begin with the negotiations. "In the counsel of many there is wisdom,” said a participant in the first recorded peace parley in history. What must never happen again is our Senate confronted with a fait accompli, and told to ratify a treaty without change, as if our chief executive were a Bourbon King of France, coercing parlement in the ceremony of a lit de justice.

THE LOST SPIRITUALITY OF POLITICS FIND myself in a singular mood as I sit down to write these columns of comment for this month. I have always conceived my function in this connection to be that of the interpretative reporter rather than the purveyor of dogmatic personal opinion. Now, the reporter, even the interpretative reporter, is supposed to start with incident and work toward an idea, to state facts and then to submit interpretation. But this afternoon, surrounded by newspaper clippings, memoranda, reports, and correspondence that mirror the month of affairs here and abroad, I find myself strangely reluctant to discuss events, strangely impelled to discuss certain abstract ideas that underlie the present posture of affairs.

Ordinarily, moves upon the chessboard of world politics, columns of industrial statistics, the rise and fall of cabinets, strategic turns in the manæeuvers of labor and capital, seem the realistic things of the month. But

to-day, with the news of the month before me, I seem unable to catch hold of political events, personalities, or pronouncements that have the feel of reality about them. The politics of the moment, domestic and foreign, seem singularly headless and soulless.

This is not, I think, a mere whimsy induced by indigestion or indolence, but rather an unconscious sensing of a situation into which public affairs have drifted since the war. Politics has lost its soul. Its spiritual note is not being struck to-day by any outstanding statesman anywhere. It may seem to some that politics is the last human game in which to expect a soul. It has always been, says the cynic, a very materialistic game of grab. Not always. There was a brief hour, preceding our entrance into the late war and while we fought, when politics seemed the supreme spiritual adventure of the race.

Woodrow Wilson's foreign policies now lie in ruins, a dismantled house of cards, but the historian of the future will look back upon the period from 1916 to 1919 as a time when an Ameri

can President turned the sinister game of diplomacy into a quest for the Holy Grail. For a few fleeting months the moral leadership of world affairs rested in Washington. World politics was a religion, and Woodrow Wilson was its prophet.

Even now, when the smoke has hardly cleared from battle-fields, we find it difficult to remember appreciatively the spiritual exaltation of those days. As the war closed, I wrote a paragraph which reminds me of the dynamic spirituality that informed the politics of the time. It ran somewhat as follows: The motivating stakes of the war were certain basic moralities, upon the vindication of which the integrity of civilization itself hinged-the principle of right as the basis of all human association, the applicability of the moral law to public affairs, and the guaranty of the weak against the lawless aggression of the strong. Regardless of the frequency with which the ghost of Machiavelli may have walked through the corridors of certain foreign offices, these were the principles that inspired alike our armies of industry and arms; these were the principles that set the tone of civilian morale; these were the principles upon which statesmen appealed to their constituencies. These principles ran through state papers and informal diplomatic pronouncements with the insistent recurrence of a motif, giving to the whole texture of international thought during the war consistent and sustained purpose.

A world debate ran parallel with the world war. The period of greatest distraction proved the period of greatest concentration upon fundamental political moralities. The studied friThe studied frivolities of dinner-table conversation gave way to the serious discussion of

the spiritual conflict that was going on above the battle of arms. Men who a few months before had been living narrow and self-centered lives went about like new converts with a passion for disinterested public service. Men gave and fought for peoples they had never seen, peoples whose names they could not pronounce. Men felt not so much that they were at war as that they were in a crusade. It was a time of political Pentecost. All this because men were challenged by a political leadership that had not forgotten that politics ought to be the supreme spiritual adventure of the race!

What is the situation now? The opposition has challenged that leadership. Mr. Wilson's policy and procedure have been attacked and defeated. With many of the details of the attack realistically minded men were and are in sympathy. The Treaty of Versailles was not a performance that measured up to the promise of Mr. Wilson's challenging addresses. But the tragic fact is that the policies of the opposition have, to date, been utterly lacking in any dynamic moral appeal to the mind of the nation. On the contrary, the opposition, however high minded and sincere, has evoked the agreement of most or all of the anti-social reactionaries, recklessly irresponsible radicals, blatherskites, and Jingoes in the country. What should have been a fundamental debate upon the best ways and means of discharging America's moral responsibility in world affairs degenerated into an ugly and disgraceful orgy of President-baiting, a chapter in American history that our grandchildren will wish might be expunged from the record! I do not mean that the honest critics of the treaty themselves angled for any such response. I charge