On February 14 the League of Nations Covenant was submitted to a conference at a plenary session, President Wilson reading the text and commenting upon the clauses as he proceeded. The emasculation of the original idea and the alteration of the original drafts had occurred in the committee meetings. So the comment was perfunctory. It was the impression of observers that the plenary session had been convoked, just as had the others before it, as a matter of form. It was “throwing the dog a bone.” I found that many of the delegates felt the same way. One, a man of great power and influence in his own country, said to me as we were leaving the Quai d’Orsay: “I do not know why I should feel so humiliated and annoyed when I come to one of these sessions. They are such farces--we ought to laugh. But the thinly veiled insult rankles.” When the armistice was renewed on February 16, the Germans were required to evacuate the greater part of the province of Posen, thus foreshadowing an important territorial decision months before the treaty was signed. Mr. Wilson and Mr. Lloyd George returned home for visits. When Mr. Wilson arrived back in France on March 13, he discovered that during his absence there had been an effort to separate the League of Nations scheme from the actual treaty. The reason given for this was the impatience that was being felt over the delay in imposing peace terms on Germany. Mr. Wilson saved the League, but at the price of agreeing to finish the discussion and decisions in secret meetings with the three Entente premiers. So the Council of Ten, composed of two delegates from each of “the five principal Allied and Associated Powers,” was replaced by a Council of Four. From this moment, Mr. Wilson was lost altogether. At first he fought valiantly for his peace program, but he gradually yielded on this point and on that until there was nothing left of his Fourteen Points, which were supposed to be the basis upon which peace was to be built. He justified his concessions to practical international politics by the expression of his firm belief in the corrective power of the League of Nations. Whether Mr. Wilson acted wisely or was justified in his sublime faith in the League Covenant are not questions that enter into this narrative. The aftermath of one of his most criticized yieldings to expediency, that of Shantung, has seemingly vindicated this compromise. But there can be no question that the conference did not use President Wilson’s “Fourteen Points and subsequent discourses, notably that of September 27, 1918,” as the guiding principles of the treaties.