At the Conference each state was dealt with according to its class. Entirely above the new law, as we saw, stood its creators, the Anglo-Saxons. To all the others, including the French, the Wilsonian doctrine was applied as fully as was compatible with its author's main object, the elaboration of an instrument which he could take back with him to the United States as the great world settlement. Within these limits the President was evidently most anxious to apply his Fourteen Points, but he kept well within these. Thus he would, perhaps, have been quite ready to insist on the abandonment by Britain of her supremacy on the seas, on a radical change in the international status of Egypt and Ireland, and much else, had these innovations been compatible with his own special object. But they were not. He was apparently minded to test the matter by announcing his resolve to moot the problem of the freedom of the seas, but when admonished by the British government that it would not even brook its mention, he at once gave it up and, presumably drawing the obvious inference from this downright refusal, applied it to the Irish, Egyptian, and other issues, which were forthwith eliminated from the category of open or international problems. But France's insistent demand, on the other hand, for the Rhine frontier met with an emphatic refusal.[127] The social reformer is disheartened by the one-sided and inexorable way in which maxims proclaimed to be of universal application were restricted to the second-class nations. Russia's case abounds in illustrations of this arbitrary, unjust, and impolitic pressure. The Russians had been our allies. They had fought heroically at the time when the people of the United States were, according to their President, "too proud to fight." They were essential factors in the Allies' victory, and consequently entitled to the advantages and immunities enjoyed by the Western Powers. In no case ought they to have been placed on the same level as our enemies, and in lieu of recompense condemned to punishment. And yet this latter conception of their deserts was not wholly new. Soon after their defection, and when the Allies were plunged in the depths of despondency, a current of opinion made itself felt among certain sections of the Allied peoples tending to the conclusion of peace on the basis of compensations to Germany, to be supplied by the cession of Russian territory. This expedient was advocated by more than one statesman, and was making headway when fresh factors arose which bade fair to render it needless.