This declaration may be considered in view of subsequent developments to be a sufficiently clear announcement of the President's theory as to the plan of organization which ought to be adopted, but at the time the exact character of the "mutual guarantees" was not disclosed and aroused little comment. I do not believe that Congress, much less the public at large, understood the purpose that the President had in mind. Undoubtedly, too, a sense of loyalty to the Chief Executive, while the war was in progress, and the desire to avoid giving comfort of any sort to the enemy, prevented a critical discussion of the announced bases of peace, some of which were at the time academic, premature, and liable to modification if conditions changed. In March Lord Phillimore and his colleagues made their preliminary report to the British Government on "a League of Nations" and this was followed in July by their final report, copies of which reached the President soon after they were made. The time had arrived for putting into concrete form the general ideas that the President held, and Colonel House, whom some believed to be the real author of Mr. Wilson's conception of a world union, prepared, I am informed, the draft of a scheme of organization. This draft was either sent or handed to the President and discussed with him. To what extent it was amended or revised by Mr. Wilson I do not know, but in a modified form it became the typewritten draft of the Covenant which he took with him to Paris, where it underwent several changes. In it was the guaranty of 1915, 1916, 1917, and 1918, which, from the form in which it appeared, logically required the use of force to give it effect. Previous to the departure of the American Commission for Paris, on December 4, 1918, the President did not consult me as to his plan for a League of Nations. He did not show me a copy of the plan or even mention that one had been put into writing. I think that there were two reasons for his not doing so, although I was the official adviser whom he should naturally consult on such matters. The first reason, I believe, was due to the following facts. In our conversations prior to 1918 I had uniformly opposed the idea of the employment of international force to compel a nation to respect the rights of other nations and had repeatedly urged judicial settlement as the practical way of composing international controversies, though I did not favor the use of force to compel such settlement. To show my opposition to an international agreement providing for the use of force and to show that President Wilson knew of this opposition and the reasons for it, I quote a letter which I wrote to him in May, 1916, that is, two years and a half before the end of the war: "_May 25, 1916_ "My DEAR MR. PRESIDENT: