For a week we junketed around Vancouver Sound in primitive little steamers. We pitched our tents in lumber towns built on stilts, crossed fire-devastated mountains into the Coeur d’Alene region of northern Idaho, where one still heard reverberations of the labor struggles which had so agitated us on _McClure’s_ and the _American_. Then Montana—miles of plateaus and plains, the air thick with smoke, the earth sprinkled with ashes, for the mountains were on fire. This magnificent and varied country carried with it a varied and compelling human story. Each new town turned up some bit of human tragedy or comedy. These people were pioneers, or pioneers once removed. They knew all the dangers, the hardships, the defeats, and conquests of pioneering. Their talk was of what they or their fathers had lived and seen. Whatever it had been, their hope was unquenchable. Every town we entered was the finest in the Northwest, the finest even when you knew that shifting trade and industry was cutting the very feet out from under it. This was the land of Borah, but never in all those ten weeks, talking on the League of Nations, did I receive from press or individuals anything but respectful hearing. I was the first person who had come into their territory from the Peace Conference, and they wanted to hear all I had to give. They would do their own appraising. As the days went by, I sensed a growing bewilderment at the fight against the League. These people had listened for years to people they honored urging some form of international union against war. They had heard Dr. Jordan and Jane Addams preaching a national council for the prevention of war, President Taft advocating a league to enforce peace. In many of the towns there had been chapters of these societies. On our circuit there was a superintendent who reminded me every time we met that back in the 1890’s he had spent practically all his patrimony going about the Northwest preaching a league of nations. It irked him, he said, that I should be receiving money for talking what he twenty-five years before had talked without price, purely for love of the cause. And no wonder! With such a background, was it strange that many people in the Northwest should have been puzzled that the Congress of the United States was seemingly more and more determined that we should not join this first attempt of the civilized world to find substitutes for war in international quarrels? Seeking reasons for this refusal, I felt the one which had most weight with people was the guarantee that France was asking from England and the United States to come to her aid in case of unprovoked attack by Germany, that is, a guarantee which was to remain in force until the League of Nations was a going concern.