in Europe out of which their people had escaped in the past. They did not understand Europe. They had no direct interest in its national rivalries. They could not control or abate its passions. All opponents of the Wilson policy regarded it as a calamity that the United States should surrender its geographical immunity from the evil heritage of the Old World and deliberately involve its future in that arena of ancient feuds. By entering the League of Nations it seemed to many that the people of the United States would be dragged into new wars in which they would have no direct or indirect interest, and that they would have to support and enforce the maintenance of European frontiers, re-drawn by the Peace Treaties, and already the cause of passionate resentment. They did not approve of all that parcelling up of territories which had taken place under the benignant name of “mandates”—British dominion in Palestine and Mesopotamia, French rule in Syria, the gobbling up of German Africa, the Greek Empire in Asia Minor. Were they to use their strength to support that new combination of powers which one day was bound to be challenged and resisted? Above all was the New World to enter into military alliance with France and Great Britain to support a policy of domination in Europe which could only last as long as the German people and their Allies were suffering from war exhaustion—a one-sided pact which would make for the tyranny of certain powers, or at least their military supremacy over other nations of the world? That would be a surrender of the whole spirit of the American people, who believed their destiny to be that of free arbitrators, and not partisans, in the future of civilisation; friends of liberty and democracy everywhere, and not allies on one side of a line. They had come into the war, they believed, as crusaders for that ideal, defenders of liberty wantonly attacked. They hated the thought that the ideal should be narrowed down to the future defence of one group of powers, who might in their turn attack or oppress the democratic liberties of their neighbours. For this reason, among others, they rejected the pact of security given by President Wilson to France in agreement with England. For these reasons, not ignoble or merely selfish—although, I think, unsound—they refused to enter the League of Nations. This withdrawal of the United States took away the strongest pillar upon which the League had been founded. Its weakness was immediately apparent. It was incapable of world judgments backed by the greatest economic power in the world. The exclusion of Russia, Germany, Austria and Hungary from its deliberations and decisions made it seem—to hostile observers—an instrument designed merely as a partisan body, upholding the opinions of the victorious Allies and giving a sham morality to their policy.