After notifying by cable the Congressional Committee on Foreign Affairs at Washington, that he would return to America and confer with them at the White House, President Wilson sailed from Brest for home on February 15, 1919. Greeted at Boston by a great multitude of enthusiastic citizens, he delivered an address in the afternoon to 7,000 people assembled in Mechanic Hall on the subject of the League of Nations. Traversing much of the ground he had covered in his speech on the draft of the League in Paris, Mr. Wilson said he had been impressed with the wonderful fact during his work at the Peace Conference that there was no nation in Europe that suspected the motives of the United States.... "Before this war, Europe did not believe in us as she does now. She did not believe in us during the first three years of the war. She seems to have believed that we were holding off because we thought we could make more by staying out than by going in. And, all of a sudden, in a short eighteen months, the whole verdict is reversed.... They saw what we did--that, without making a single claim, we put all our men and all our means at the disposal of those who were fighting for their homes, in the first instance, but for a cause, the cause of human rights and justice, and that we went in, not to support their national claims, but to support the great cause which they held in common. And when they saw that not only America held ideas, but acted ideals, they were converted to America and became firm partisans of those ideals.... "And now do you realize that this confidence which we have established throughout the world imposes a burden upon us, if you choose to call it a burden? It is one of those burdens which any nation should be proud to carry." President Wilson said that all the peoples of Europe were buoyed up with a new hope, that they believed a new age was dawning, when nations would understand each other and support each other in every just cause and unite every moral and physical strength to see that right should prevail. "If America were at this juncture to fail the world, what would become of it?" He dwelt on the despair and bitterness that would follow if America failed to justify the world's hope; on the return to the old bad conditions that had prevailed before the war when all European nations were hostile camps.