On July 4, 1918, when President Wilson received the representatives of subject races at Mount Vernon, he made a solemn pledge in the name of the American people to _all_ subject races. A Lithuanian stood with the others before Washington’s tomb. Neither in that speech nor in any other did Wilson say, “You understand, of course, that the victorious Allies mean to free and restore only the subject races whose freedom and restoration will be at the expense of our enemies and to their confusion.” Had he said this, it would have been a manly confession--to avoid false hopes and false pretenses--of what was afterward evident at the Peace Conference, that the yearning for humanity was a sham and the proclamation of the doctrine of self-determination a falsehood. The moral issue was simply buncombe to make people feel good and to arouse them against the Germans. Because races were conquered by the Romanoffs, have they less right to freedom than if they were conquered by the Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns? When we read carefully the Colby note, which was meant to justify the refusal of the State Department to follow the example of our associates in recognizing and dealing with and helping the Baltic Sea republics, we challenge its logic as well as its misrepresentation of the American idealism expressed by President Wilson during the war. Poland and Finland were portions of “integral Russia”; so was Russian Armenia; so was Bessarabia. Without consulting Russia, we recognized the independence of Poland, Finland, and Armenia, and agreed to the inclusion of Bessarabia in Rumania. The State Department expert will respond that Poland and Finland had a special status under the Treaty of Vienna. Why go back in regard to Russia only to the Treaty of Vienna? In making the Treaties of Versailles and St.-Germain we canceled the Treaty of Vienna. We ignored this treaty and all other treaties in dealing with subject races of Austria-Hungary and Germany. The attempt to justify partiality of treatment between Poland and the Baltic Sea republics on the ground of the Treaty of Vienna fails even if we did accept the Treaty of Vienna as the law and the prophets. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania enjoyed an individual status in the Russian Empire by virtue of arrangements made before the Napoleonic period and not infringed upon until 1830. The charter of Lithuania was not finally abrogated until 1848, and the title of Grand Duke of Lithuania was assumed by the Russian Czar on a parity with that of King of Poland and Grand Duke of Finland at coronations. This acknowledgment of the separate identity of Lithuania in the empire was never given up. The late Nicholas was crowned Grand Duke of Lithuania.