The human elements in frontier-making are still more complex than the geographical. Obviously we have to do not with individuals but with groups, and with those larger groups which have acquired a full measure of what the sociologists call ‘consciousness of kind,’ to the point of constituting some kind of national unity or national organization. We speak of the self-determination of peoples, but what is a people? Is it created by race or language or political allegiance, or only by that more subtle compound which we call nationality? How large must a people be to have a right to stand alone? Can it stand alone without certain economic and even military prerequisites? How far can we go in breaking up states in order to give effect to self-determination? Such general principles might have a very wide application. Formulated with special reference to the Central Powers, self-determination was seized upon by men who had a case to urge in any part of the world--in Ireland, in Egypt, in the Philippines. A German map of last spring even represented Hawaii, St. Thomas, Florida, and Texas as trying to escape from their unwilling subjection to the United States[3]--a curious evidence that German mentality had not changed since the notorious Zimmermann note of 1917. More than once it was necessary to point out that the function of the Paris Conference was not to do abstract justice in every corner of the earth, but to make peace with Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey. Many causes perhaps excellent in themselves were not the business of the Conference. Even within the self-imposed limits of the Conference, there were difficulties. “Self-determination,” President Wilson had said, “is not a mere phrase, it is an imperative principle of action.” But President Wilson had also said that self-government cannot be given but must be earned; that “liberty is the privilege of maturity, of self-control,” that “some peoples may have it, therefore, and others may not.”[4] However just and admirable self-determination might be, it could be fully applied only to peoples who had some experience in self-government and thus some means of political self-expression. For this reason it was not applicable to the downtrodden natives of the German colonies. And even among self-governing peoples there are practical limitations. Self-determination may be only another name for secession, and we fought the Civil War to prevent that; we have been none too successful in securing the subsequent self-determination of the negroes in the southern states. Sometimes a people may be too small to stand alone, and sometimes, as in parts of the Balkans and Asia Minor, the mixture of peoples may defy separation. In western Asia, notably, national aspirations have outrun the social organization.