Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements Part 5

2 ABSOLUTE FREEDOM of navigation upon the seas outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war, except as the seas may be closed in whole or in part by international action for the enforcement of international covenants.

_No Economic Barriers_

3 THE REMOVAL, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace and a.s.sociating themselves for its maintenance.

_Reduce National Armaments_

4 ADEQUATE GUARANTEES given and taken that national armaments will be reduced to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety.

_Colonial Claims_

5 A FREE, open minded and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose t.i.tle is to be determined.

_Russian Territory_

6 THE EVACUATION of all Russian territory and such a settlement of all questions affecting Russia as will secure the best and freest cooperation of the other nations of the world in obtaining for her an unhampered and unembarra.s.sed opportunity for the independent determination of her own political development and national policy and a.s.sure her of a sincere welcome into the society of free nations under inst.i.tutions of her own choosing, and, more than a welcome, a.s.sistance also of every kind that she may need and may herself desire. The treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations in the months to come will be the acid test of their good-will, of their comprehension of her needs as distinguished from their own interests and of their intelligent and unselfish sympathy.

_Restoration of Belgium_

7 BELGIUM, the whole world will agree, must be evacuated and restored without any attempt to limit the sovereignty which she enjoys in common with all other free nations. No other single act will serve as this will serve to restore confidence among the nations in the laws which they have themselves set and determined for the government of their relations with one another. Without this healing act the whole structure and validity of international law is forever impaired.

_Alsace-Lorraine to France_

8 ALL FRENCH territory should be freed and the invaded portions restored and the wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, which has unsettled the peace of the world for nearly fifty years, should be righted in order that peace may once more be made secure in the interest of all.

_New Frontiers for Italy_

9 A READJUSTMENT of the frontiers of Italy should be effected along clearly recognizable lines of nationality.

_Autonomy in Austria-Hungary_

10 THE PEOPLES of Austria-Hungary, whose place among the nations we wish to see safeguarded and a.s.sured, should be accorded the freest opportunity of autonomous development.

_Rumania, Serbia and Montenegro_

11 RUMANIA, SERBIA and MONTENEGRO should be evacuated; occupied territories restored; Serbia accorded free and secure access to the sea, and the relations of the several Balkan States to one another determined by friendly counsel along historically established lines of allegiance and nationality; and international guarantees of the political and economic independence and territorial integrity of the several Balkan States should be entered into.

_Autonomy in Turkey_

12 THE TURKISH portions of the present Ottoman Empire should be a.s.sured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be a.s.sured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development, and the Dardanelles should be permanently opened as a free pa.s.sage to the ships and commerce of all nations under international guarantees.

_For an Independent Poland_

13 AN INDEPENDENT Polish State should be erected which should include the territory inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which should be a.s.sured a free and secure access to the sea and whose political and economic independence and territorial integrity should be guaranteed by international covenant.

_League of Nation_

14 A GENERAL a.s.sociation of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guaranties of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small States alike.

But the war did not go on into 1919. If America could contribute no aircraft and guns to the campaign of 1918, she could at least contribute men. The emergency of March and April brought forth a prodigious effort, and soldiers began to be shipped across the Atlantic by hundreds of thousands. By July 4 there were a million, before the end of the year over 2,000,000; and they could fight. At the end of the Summer the Germans realized that the war was lost; and realizing it, they turned back to President Wilson's mediation which they had rejected eighteen months before, and to the Fourteen Points which had been looked on so coldly in the previous Winter.

The first move was made by the Austrians, who on Sept. 15 proposed a conference for a "preliminary and non-binding" discussion of war aims.

The President refused the next day, with the observation that America's war aims had been stated so often that there could be no doubt what they were. But it was evident that more peace proposals would follow, and on Sept. 27 the President delivered an address in the Metropolitan Opera House in New York in which his latest conception of the duties of the Peace Conference was set forth. He had realized that peace without victory was unsafe in view of the character of the German Government; it must be a peace with guarantees, for n.o.body would trust the Germans.

But it must be a peace of impartial justice, "involving no discrimination between those to whom we wish to be just and those to whom we do not wish to be just," and the guarantee must be provided by a League of Nations which the Peace Conference itself--and not a subsequent general conference, as the President had held in the days of his neutrality--must organize. The development was logical; nearly all the American powers had entered the war, and neutrals were far less numerous than in 1916. And he argued that the League of Nations must be formed at the Peace Conference, to be "in a sense the most essential part" of its work, because it was not likely that it could be formed after the conference, and if formed during the war it would only be an alliance of the powers a.s.sociated against Germany.

The Germans apparently thought these p.r.o.nouncements offered some hope.

Their Government was hastily being covered with a false front of democratic inst.i.tutions to suit his insistence, and on Oct. 4 the new Chancellor, Prince Max of Baden, appealed to the President to call a peace conference at once, the basis of peace to be the Fourteen Points and conditions set forth in the President's later addresses, specifically that of Sept. 27. There ensued an interchange of notes lasting throughout an entire month, in which the President acted nominally as intermediary between the Germans and the Allies, though actually he was in constant touch with allied statesmen. What began as a duel of diplomatic dexterity presently developed into a German diplomatic rout as the German armies, retreating everywhere, drew nearer and nearer German soil. Positions which the German Government had hoped to defend were successively abandoned; the Germans agreed to accept without argument the Fourteen Points, with discussion at the conference limited only to details of their practical application, and to recognize the alterations which had been made in some of them by subsequent decisions of the American Government. They accepted the President's insistence that a peace conference must be conditional on an armistice which would imply complete evacuation of allied territory and the a.s.surance of "the present supremacy" of the allied armies, and they strove desperately to convince him that the democratization of the German Government was real. Delegates went to Marshal Foch to discuss the armistice terms, and on Nov. 5 the Allies formally notified the President that they accepted the Fourteen Points, with the reservation of the freedom of the seas and subject to a definition of the rest.i.tution which the Germans must make for damage done.

On the same day sailors of the German High Sea Fleet, ordered out to die fighting in a last thrust at the British, mutinied and began a revolution that spread all over the empire. From the balcony of the Imperial Palace in Berlin Karl Liebknecht proclaimed the republic; the Kaiser fled across the Dutch border between two days; and on Nov. 11 the fighting ended and the Germans submitted to the terms imposed by Marshal Foch.

_Peace Conference and Treaty, 1919_

So the war had been ended by the military defeat of the Germans. In arranging the preliminaries of peace Mr. Wilson's influence had been dominant. But the personal aspect of his triumph was far more imposing in 1918 than it could possibly have been in 1916. Had his mediation ended the war before America entered it would have been bitterly resented in the allied countries and by American sympathizers of the Allies. But in the interval the President had appeared as the leader of the nation which furnished the decisive addition to allied strength that brought the final victory; he had at last condemned in strong terms the German Government, toward which he had to maintain a neutral att.i.tude earlier in the war, and he had had the satisfaction of seeing that Government overthrown at last when the German people realized that it had cost them more than it was worth. So now the war was ended in victory, but still ended by Wilson's mediation, and moreover on terms which he himself had laid down--another triumph that would have been unthinkable two years earlier. In November, 1918, Woodrow Wilson was exalted in the estimation of the world more highly than any other human being for a century past, and far more highly than any other American had ever been raised in the opinion of the peoples of Europe.

But he had just suffered a surprising defeat at home. It became evident to Democratic leaders in the early Fall of 1918 that they were likely to lose the Congressional elections. Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives had been so notoriously incompetent that most of the war measures had had to be carried through under the leadership of Republicans, and there was grave dissatisfaction with some of the members of the Cabinet. The appeals of Democrats in danger were heard sympathetically at the White House, and on Oct. 25 the President had issued a statement asking the people to vote for Democratic Congressional candidates "if you have approved of my leadership and wish me to continue to be your unembarra.s.sed spokesman in affairs at home and abroad." He admitted that the Republicans in Congress had supported the war, but declared that they had been against the Administration and that the time was too critical for divided leadership. It was the sort of appeal that any European Premier might have made upon "going to the country," and the President ended with the statement that "I am your servant and will accept your judgment without cavil."

If this statement had never been issued, the results of the ensuing election might not have been accepted as a repudiation of the President. But he had made it a "question of confidence," to borrow a term from European politics, and the result was disastrous. The elections gave the Republicans a majority of thirty-nine in the lower house and a majority of two in the Senate, which by a two-thirds vote would have to ratify the peace treaty which the Executive would negotiate. In such a situation a European Premier would, of course, have had to resign, but the President of the United States could hardly resign just as the war was coming to an end. The attempt to fit the parliamentary system into the framework of the American Const.i.tution had failed. The President made no comment on the outcome of the election, but he continued to be the unembarra.s.sed spokesman of America in affairs at home and particularly abroad. It soon became known that he intended to go to the Peace Conference in person--at the request, it was intimated, of Clemenceau and Lloyd George. The criticism of this plan was by no means confined to Republicans, but the President persisted in it. There was a widespread demand for a non-partisan Peace Commission, but the apparent concession which the President finally made to this sentiment--the appointment of Henry White, long out of the diplomatic service and never very active in politics, as the sole Representative on a commission of five--satisfied the bulk of Republican sentiment not at all. It should be observed however, that behind the five official delegates there was a host of experts--military, economic, legal and ethnological--some of whom did very important service at the conference; and in the selection of this body no party lines had been drawn.

On December 4 the President sailed from New York on an army transport, accompanied by Mrs. Wilson and by a whole caravan of savants loaded down with statistics and doc.u.ments. He left a nation whose sentiment was divided between sharp resentment and a rather apprehensive hope for the best, but he landed on a continent which was prepared to offer to Woodrow Wilson a triumphal reception such as European history had never known. The six weeks between his landing at Brest and the opening of the Peace Conference were devoted to a series of processions through England, France and Italy, in which the Governments and the people strove to outdo each other in expressing their enthusiasm for the leader of the great and victorious crusade for justice and democracy.

Sovereigns spiritual and temporal and the heads of Governments heaped him with all the honors in their power, and crowds of workingmen stood for hours in the rain that they might see him for a moment at a railroad station. Even from neutral Holland, divided Ireland and hostile Germany came invitations to the President, and he would probably have been received by those peoples as enthusiastically as by British, French and Italians.

For the war had been ended on the basis of the ideals of President Wilson. Those ideals had been expressed in vague and general terms, and every Government thought that its own war aims coincided with them.

Every people, suddenly released from the long and terrible strain of the war, thought that all its troubles were suddenly to be ended by the principles of President Wilson. Jugo-Slavs and Italians claimed Istria and Fiume, and each felt itself supported by the principles of President Wilson. To Frenchmen those principles meant that Germany must pay for the war forced on France, and to Germans they meant that a ruined France and an uninvaded Germany could start again on the same footing.

The Peace conference that began on January 18 was bound to disillusion a great many people, including President Wilson himself. Principles had to be translated into practice, and every effort to do so left one party to the dispute, if not both, convinced that the principles had been betrayed. The treaty which was eventually produced led American liberals to complain that the President had surrendered to European imperialism, and brought from such Republicans as still admired the Allies the complaint that he had betrayed allied interests at the promptings of pacifism. Equally diverse opinions might have been obtained from all types of extremists in Europe. The Fourteen Points were susceptible of varying interpretations, according to individual interests; and at the very outset the American delegates found some of the allied leaders contending that they need not be considered, since the Germans had surrendered, not because they regarded the principles of President Wilson as just, but because they had been beaten. There was undoubtedly a great deal of truth in this contention, but the American delegates succeeded in holding the conference to the position that having accepted the German surrender on certain terms it would have to abide by those terms. The terms had to be interpreted, however, and every agreement on the details led to a protest from somebody that the President had abandoned the Fourteen Points.

All this, together with the growing Republican opposition at home which was making itself heard in Europe, led to a rapid decline in the President's prestige. So long as it was a question of generalities he was the moral leader of the peoples of the world, but after a few weeks of getting down to particulars he was only the head of the peace delegation of a single State--and a State in which there was already serious opposition to his policy. This altered standing was made evident toward the end of April, when a protracted disagreement with the Italian delegation over the Adriatic question led the President to issue a declaration of his position which was virtually an appeal to the Italian people over the heads of their own representatives. Nowhere had the President been received with more enthusiasm than in his trip through Italy four months before; but now Dr. Orlando, the Italian Premier, went home and promptly got a virtually unanimous vote of confidence from his Parliament, which was supported by the overwhelming majority of the people.

The treaty was finally signed on June 28, and the President left at once for home to take up the fight to get it through the Senate--a fight which, it was already apparent, would be about as hard as the struggle to get any treaty evolved at all out of the conflicting national interests in Paris. There was a demonstration for him at Brest as he left French soil, but nothing like the enthusiasm that had greeted his arrival. This was perhaps the measure of his inevitable decline in the estimation of Europe; it remained to be seen how he stood at home. As early as January 1, before the Peace Conference met, Senator Lodge, Republican leader in the Senate, had declared that the conference ought to confine itself to the Peace Treaty and leave the League of Nations for later discussion.

On February 14, after the first reading of the League covenant, the President had made a hurried trip home to talk it over with the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations--a committee that had been loaded up with enemies of the League of Nations. The members of the committee dined with him at the White House on February 26, and the covenant was discussed for several hours. But the President could not convert the doubters; on March 3 Senator Lodge announced that thirty-seven Republican Senators were opposed to the League in its present form, and that they regarded a demand for its alteration as the exercise of the Senate's const.i.tutional right of advice on treaties. The President took up the challenge, and on the following day, just before sailing back to Paris, he declared in a public address that the League and treaty were inextricably interwoven; that he did not intend to bring back "the corpse of a treaty," and that those who opposed the League must be deaf to the demands of common men the world over.

The fight was now begun. Some modifications were made in the covenant in the direction of meeting criticisms by Elihu Root, but it was adopted. On July 10 the treaty was laid before the Senate and referred to the Committee on Foreign Relations, which at once began to hear opinions on it. The President himself appeared before the committee on August 19. Outside the Senate party lines were breaking up; the Irish and German elements who had come into line during the war, but had felt that their interpretation of President Wilson's ideals had been violated by the treaty, were aligned in support of the Republican opposition; and a certain element of the Democratic Party which inclined to admire the theory of traditional isolation found itself in harmony with the Republicans. On the other hand, many moderate Republicans supported the President, chief among them Mr. Taft; and in the churches and colleges support of the League commanded an overwhelming majority.