As Colonel House was the other member of the Commission on the League of Nations and would have to consider the practicability and expediency of including the mandatory system in the Covenant, I read the memorandum to him stating that I had orally presented most of the questions to the President who characterized them as "legal technicalities" and for that reason unimportant. I said to the Colonel that I differed with the President, as I hoped he did, not only as to the importance of considering the difficulties raised by the questions before the system of mandates was adopted, but also as to the importance of viewing from every standpoint the wisdom of the system and the difficulties that might arise in its practical operation. I stated that, in my opinion, a simpler and better plan was to transfer the sovereignty over territory to a particular nation by a treaty of cession under such terms as seemed wise and, in the case of some of the newly erected states, to have them execute treaties accepting protectorates by Powers mutually acceptable to those states and to the League of Nations. Colonel House, though he listened attentively to the memorandum and to my suggestions, did not seem convinced of the importance of the questions or of the advantages of adopting any other plan than that of the proposed mandatory system. To abandon the system meant to abandon one of the ideas of international supervision, which the President especially cherished and strongly advocated. It meant also to surrender one of the proposed functions of the League as an agent in carrying out the peace settlements under the Treaty, functions which would form the basis of an argument in favor of the organization of the League and furnish a practical reason for its existence. Of course the presumed arguments against the abandonment of mandates may not have been considered, but at the time I believed that they were potent with Colonel House and with the President. The subsequent advocacy of the system by these two influential members of the Commission on the League of Nations, which resulted in its adoption, in no way lessened my belief as to the reasons for their support. The mandatory system, a product of the creative mind of General Smuts, was a novelty in international relations which appealed strongly to those who preferred to adopt unusual and untried methods rather than to accept those which had been tested by experience and found practical of operation. The self-satisfaction of inventing something new or of evolving a new theory is inherent with not a few men. They are determined to try out their ideas and are impatient of opposition which seeks to prevent the experiment. In fact opposition seems sometimes to enhance the virtue of a novelty in the minds of those who propose or advocate its adoption. Many reformers suffer from this form of vanity.