The war could not have been won without the aid of the United States. The treaty could not have been imposed upon Germany without the aid of the United States. Could the treaty be enforced without the aid of the United States? Thinking men everywhere realized that the logical result of the failure of the American Senate to ratify the Treaty of Versailles would be the scrapping of the treaty. British public opinion, which had begun to turn against the treaty because of its heavy responsibilities and its supposed connection with British unemployment, clamored for revision of the treaty and the League, drastically if need be, in order to get the United States back into European affairs. French public opinion demanded that the French Government be prepared to use its army to collect reparations and destroy the unity of Germany, a policy which should end in a new treaty, directly between France and Germany, in which France was to dictate the terms mistakenly abandoned or modified during the Paris Conference. CHAPTER VI NEW LIGHT ON THE TRAGEDY OF PARIS The events of the past four years in Europe and Asia, coupled with the final decision of the American people not to enter the League of Nations, give us the right to call the six months of blasted hopes in 1919 the tragedy of Paris. For an astonishingly long time the Peace Conference and the treaties framed by it had their defenders, especially in the United States, where a group of what the French would call _intellectuels_ declared that critics of the treaties and the League Covenant were unreasonable and uninformed. Colonel Edward M. House organized in Philadelphia a series of lectures on the Treaty of Versailles by experts and Presidential advisers attached to the American Commission to Negotiate Peace. The lectures were valuable contributions to Peace Conference literature. They told much, and told it well. They were accurate and comprehensive. But some of these gentlemen directly, and others by inference, said that the American public had been misled by correspondents whose judgments were based on gossip and rumor rather than on knowledge of what actually happened. It is difficult for the professional writer to answer this sort of charge. Although he has as much pride in his accuracy as the college professor, and is fully as careful to base statements on source material personally investigated and tested, the newspaper correspondent is unable to cite his sources and quote his authorities. He deals with history in the making. He must be discreet. He must avoid using names. When he is accused of not knowing what he is talking about and of making sweeping assertions, he has to bide his time.