What Mr. Wilson did not appreciate was the fact that the moot questions had been settled long before the war ended by secret compacts, and that the object of the Paris Conference was not to draw up terms of peace, in the interest of the peoples and regions concerned, but to arrive at a satisfactory adjustment of interests among the victors. The Turkish treaty was not drafted in 1919 simply because the Entente premiers could not agree upon a satisfactory compromise. They paid no attention to the Covenant, with its mandatory provision. It was too much to ask of them the fulfilment of this promise when they were unable to reconcile their previous commitments. For instance, Article XII could not be carried out either in Palestine or Syria. Ninety per cent of the Palestinians, including thousands of its Jewish population, were bitterly opposed to the Balfour Declaration. Mr. Wilson’s mandate commission discovered that the great bulk of the Syrians were hostile to the French mandate. When Emir Feisal took over Damascus, in conformity with the Anglo-Hedjaz agreement and the undoubted wishes of its inhabitants, the French sent an army against him, drove him out, and hanged “for treason” many of his followers. In vain the Hedjaz invoked Articles XIII, XV, XVI, and XVII of the Covenant, which were supposed to make impossible such an event as the French expedition against Damascus. The inhabitants of Palestine, also, have tried for more than four years to get a hearing from the League of Nations, which has consistently ignored Article XXII. The Arabs of Mesopotamia were unable to secure the recognition of their rights until they had succeeded in driving the British almost entirely out of their country. The French formed the Armenians of Cilicia into regiments, told them that they were fighting for their independence, and then deserted them when French interests seemed to make it advantageous to betray the Armenians and hand Cilicia back to the Turks. The Conference of Paris adjourned without having come to an agreement upon three vital questions: the terms of the treaty with Turkey, the adoption of a common policy toward Russia, and an understanding as to the means to be employed to compel Germany to fulfil the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. These problems led to a series of continuation conferences from 1920 to 1923, without reaching understandings of even a quasi-permanent nature. The continuation conferences as a whole are discussed in another chapter. Here we shall limit ourselves to the Conference of San Remo, in April, 1920, which endeavored to settle the devolution of the Ottoman Empire by drafting a treaty with Turkey. The results of its deliberations were the ill fated Treaty of Sèvres and the demonstration of two facts: that the three great problems cited above could not be dissociated; and that the Entente premiers believed that the League of Nations could not help in the solution of any one of them.