eral for whom we have the highest admiration and the deepest gratitude. But this General, no matter how great his glory, is an obstacle to the decisions of the governments. We cannot accept this situation and permit the authority we have conferred to be turned against us. It is a fundamental question of constitutional responsibility. We are to-day, as yesterday, ready to accept a French general as Commander-in-Chief. But we must have a general who obeys the governments." ClemenClemenceau found Foch hard to handle, but finally drew from him an expression of regret, and at the conclusion of the interview the Marshal said smilingly: "All right. I will call off my dogs of war." IMPORTANT FALLACIES REVEALED BUT when the treaty came before the French Cabinet for final approval, Foch renewed his attack. The result was that Clemenceau secured the insertion in the treaty of the following clause in connection with the fifteen-year period of occupation: "If, at that date, the guarantees against an unprovoked aggression by Germany are not considered sufficient by the Allied and Associated governments, the evacuation of the occupying troops may be delayed to the extent regarded as necessary for the purpose of obtaining the required guarantees.' If the United States Senate does not agree to the guarantee treaty before the end of the fifteen-year period, there is little likelihood that the French will withdraw from the Rhine. Tardieu's conclusion, which the United States Senate would do well to ponder, is as follows: "The future rests with the Government of the United States, and with it alone, in the exercise of its national sovereignty. We know what we wish may be the outcome for the sake of the peace of the world in which France, more than any one else, is interested. But in case the hoped-for assistance fails us, we shall have to remain on the Rhine, and, in the absence of undertakings now pending as by virtue of the Treaty of Versailles for the common good of all, mount guard for Liberty." On one point those who were most active in the work of the Conference are emphatic. It is this-that the question of the League of Nations did not delay the conclusion of the Treaty. The questions we have reviewed in this article were the ones that caused discussion and delay. In fact, the Allied and Associated Powers were definitely pledged by the last of the Fourteen Points, a part of the pre-armistice agreement, to form an association of nations as an integral part of the peace settlement. That pledge was stated in these words: "A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike." Thus Article X was the only part of the Covenant to which the Powers had definitely committed themselves in advance. The new states created by the Conference, and the boundaries established, were to be definitely guaranteed; and the League was the means devised to carry out this and other provisions of the Treaty. The House book throws many interesting lights on the personality of Wilson and his methods of work. That he did not consult Lansing need not be a matter of surprise to any one who reads Lansing's book, but Lansing appears to be about the only one who was not consulted. The experts attached to the Commission all testify that the President relied upon them at every point and generally adopted their conclusions. Mr. Lamont says: "I am going to take this opportunity to say a word in general as to President Wilson's attitude at the Peace Conference. He is accused of having been unwilling to consult his colleagues. I never saw a man more ready and anxious to consult than he. He has been accused of having been desirous to gain credit for himself and to ignore others. I never saw a man more considerate of those of his coadjutors who were working immediately with him, nor a man more ready to give them credit." Bibliographical Note: No serious student of the subject can afford to be without the "History of the Peace Conference of Paris," edited by H. W. V. Temperley, and published under the auspices of the Institute of International Affairs. This elaborate work is to be in five volumes, three of which have already appeared. The Institute of International Affairs was founded at Paris in 1919 by a group of technical delegates, and is composed of two branches, one in Great Britain, and one in the United States. Its object is set forth in a resolution adopted at the time in the following words: "That the purpose of this Institute should be to keep its members in touch with the international situation and enable them to study the relation between national policies "The Truth About the Treaty" and "What Really Happened at Paris" 345 and the interests of society as a whole." The first task undertaken by the Institute was the publication of a history of the Peace Conference, and under the able editorship of Mr. Temperley the work has been carried on with great success, the different parts being assigned to the specialists who in each case were considered best qualified to handle the subject. The work contains valuable maps, documents, and commentaries, and will be an indispensable source of information on all phases of the Conference. Of the other books we shall mention, some are by men who participated in the work of the Conference, and others by newspaper correspondents. While Colonel House and General Bliss have contributed chapters to the volume prepared by the American experts, Tardieu and Lansing are the only two members of commissions who have published separate volumes. Lansing's book is mainly an attack on Wilson, and throws no new light on the Conference. Its author goes to great pains to demonstrate, beyond the possibility of contradiction, what many people had suspected and some known, that he was never more than a figure-head in the Wilson administration. Haskins and Lord, two historians attached to the American commission, have contributed a valuable volume on "Some Problems of the Peace Conference." This book deals mainly with the question of boundaries, Professor Haskins writing the chapters on the western boundaries of Germany, and Professor Lord, those dealing with Poland, Austria, and the Balkans. Of the books dealing with the economic aspects of the treaty, the best known is that by J. M. Keynes, "The Economic Consequences of the Peace." His sensational caricature in Chapter III of the members of the Council of Four and their methods of work, and particularly of Wilson, whom he describes as the old Presbyterian who was harder to "debamboozle" than to "bamboozle," brought the book a ready sale. M. Mantoux, the official interpreter, has stated that Keynes never attended a session of the Council, whose proceedings he so vividly describes. For the rest, the book is anti-French, and emphasizes the importance of economic rather than political frontiers. Keynes believes that the reconstruction of eastern Europe and the Balkans. depends upon the economic recovery of Germany. Keynes' arguments have called forth a number of replies, the most important of which are David Hunter Miller's articles in the New York Evening Post in February, 1920; B. M. Baruch's "The Making of the Reparations and Economic Sections of the Treaty"; and R. G. Lévy, "La Juste Paix, ou la Vérité sur la Traité de Versailles." M. Lévy is a French Senator. J. L. Garvin, editor of the London Observer, has a bulky volume on “The Economic Foundations of Peace," which is of value, though written before the Conference had completed its work. He had the first draft of the League Covenant before him, and emphasizes the importance of economic cooperation throughout the League as the key to world peace. The remaining books to which we shall refer are by press correspondents and based, to a great extent, on the despatches which they sent out from day to day. E. J. Dillon's "The Inside Story of the Peace Conference" was manifestly written on the outside. It is brilliant, but untrustworthy, and contains a number of good stories that few readers will be so naïve as to believe. "The Peace Tangle" by J. F. Bass is a very serious description of conditions in Europe and of the difficulties encountered by the Conference, which, he thinks, failed to solve them rightly. It is critical and pessimistic. C. T. Thompson's "The Peace Conference Day by Day" is a sane and valuable record of how the various questions were regarded in Paris as they came up before the Conference. Sisley Huddleston's "Peace Making at Paris" is based on articles which he wrote from Paris to the leading English reviews. George Creel's "The War, the World, and Wilson" contains some new and interesting explanations of things and possesses a certain value, notwithstanding its eulogistic character and its flamboyant style. Ray Stannard. Baker's "What Wilson Did at Paris" is also highly eulogistic. The author was in close daily association with Wilson and thinks he made no mistakes. America and England THE LONDON LETTERS OF WALTER H. PAGE American Ambassador to Great Britain during the World War The first of a series of instalments from Ta cabinet meeting, held in February, 1915, President Wilson entertained his associates by reading extracts from one of the letters of his Ambassador to Great Britain, Mr. Walter H. Page. A "Some day," the President said, "I hope that Walter Page's letters will be published. They are the best letters I have ever read. They make you feel the atmosphere in England, understand the people, and see into the motives of the great actors. When published, they will give the finest picture obtainable anywhere of England during the war." Col. Edward M. House, to whom many of the letters were addressed, has also expressed his wish that they should be published. "I have never read anything," he says, "that can compare with them. They are destined to become classics." For some time Mr. Burton J. Hendrick has been preparing the authorized biography of Mr. Page, based largely upon his correspondence. The letters, assembled from many sources, justify the opinions expressed above, as well as that of Mr. Edwin A. Alderman, president of the University of Virginia. At the meeting held in honor of Mr. Page's memory, at the Brick Presbyterian Church, on April 25, 1919, President Alderman said: "I have never known a more perfect democrat than Walter Page. He wasted no time in defining that great Hope, as he called it. The conception thrilled and exalted and stimulated and guided him as religion used to guide its devotees in the age of Faith. He had thought the thing out and talked it out and ordered it into a creed. 'It's the end of the year,' he wrote me at Christmas in 1912. 'Mrs. Page and I (alone) have been talking of democracy. I do profoundly hold the democratic faith and believe that it can be worked into action among men.' And in the same letter, he added: 'I have a new amusement, a new excitement, a new study, as you have and as we all have who really believe in a democracy-a new study, a new hope, and sometimes a new fear; and its name is Wilson. I have for many years regarded myself as an interested, but always a somewhat detached, outsider, believing that the democratic idea was real and safe and lifting, if we could ever get it put into action, contenting myself ever with such patches of it as time and accident and occasion now and then sewed on our gilded or tattered garments. But now it is come-the real thing; at any rate a man whose thought and aim and dream are our thought and aim and dream. That's enormously exciting! I didn't suppose I'd ever become so interested in a general proposition or in a governmental hope.' "I have known no man of wider and tenderer sympathies, of greater joy in praise of others, and greater genius in discovering the best in others. There are many noble men in America who found themselves because he first found them. When his Memoirs come to be written, I prophesy that the number of the letters that he wrote, and the contacts that he maintained with all sorts of men, will astonish his biographer. And such letters! beautiful in handwriting, fresh in thought, turbulent with strident common sense and radiant hope and virile humor. If he shall be not adjudged the best letter writer of his generation, I shall be much mistaken. About the time of his appointment to the English post, a certain menace of disease condemned me to inactivity in the great, cold, north country of New York. Week by week, beautiful letters came to me from him-all in his engraved-like handwriting. They were sent primarily to beguile my sickness and silence, but they fairly throbbed with interest and bold opinions and poetical insights and praise of friends and now and then Gargantuan merriment and laughter. I often read them with mingled laughter and tears, remembering the motive that moved the busy man, and stirred by their sense and substance. The letters didn't cease until the ship, bearing him to his great task, was approaching Liverpool. Writing in December, 1912, åmidst all sorts of conceit and mounting enthusiasms, I find these noble sentences spoken to strengthen a lonely man's courage. 'I've a book or two more to send you. If they interest you, praise the gods. If they bore you, fling 'em in the snow and think no worse of me. You can't tell what a given book may be worth to a given man in an unknown mood. They become such a commodity to me that I thank my stars for a month away from them when I may come at 'em at a different angle and really read a few old ones-Wordsworth, for instance. When you get old enough, you'll wake up some day with the feeling that the world is much more beautiful than it was when you were young, that a landscape has a clearer meaning, that the sky is more companionable, that outdoor color and motion are more splendidly audacious and beautifully rhythmical than you had ever thought. That's true. The gently snow-clad little pines out my window are more to me than the whole Taft Administration. They'll soon be better than the year's dividends. And the few great craftsmen in words, who can confirm this feeling-they are the masters you become grateful for. Then the sordidness of the world lies far beneath you and your great democracy is truly come-the democracy of nature. To be akin to a tree, in this sense, is as good as to be akin to a man. I have a grove of little long-leaf pines down in the old country, and I know they'll have some consciousness of me after all men have forgotten me: I've saved 'em, and they'll sing a century of gratitude if I can keep 'em saved.'" In its September number, the WORLD'S WORK will begin the publication of that part of Mr. Page's correspondence which covered his Ambassadorship to Great Britain. Mr. Walter H. Page, whose lot it was to serve as America's representative in London during the five most critical years of modern history, was born in Cary, a small town near Raleigh, N. C., in 1855. His ancestry was chiefly English with admixtures of Scotch-Irish and Huguenot; his forbears had been planters for several generations; and Mr. Page's boyhood was passed in a South which had just passed through the Civil War, in a state which had itself been invaded and in parts devastated by northern troops, and which had suffered even more severely from the social and economic ravages of the Reconstruction Era. Such an environment might at first seem an unpropitious one for the development of the sturdiest and most loyal breed of Americanism. Yet from his infancy the future Ambassador had known no other purpose. His father had been a Whig before the Civil War-which meant that, in the deadly issue of secession, his sympathies had been against secession; as a Southerner he accepted the decision of his neighbors in 1861, and loyally supported the Confederacy; as soon as the struggle ended, however, he immediately became a pioneer in the new work of rebuilding the old commonwealth. Walter Page thus imbibed this atmosphere as a child and it gave direction to his whole after life. All his activities were grouped around two great purposes, and both of them were enterprises of reconciliation. His first ambition was to play a part in healing the wounds of the Civil War and in making North and South sympathetic and coöperating units in a new and greater Americanism. His second was to carry this work into a still wider sphere, and bring together—this time not as a political unit, but as a force working for everything that is best in modern life-all the branches of the English-speaking peoples. Both these purposes Page regarded as practically one. He believed that the Englishspeaking civilization, political, social, intellectual, and economic, represented the highest that mankind had attained. "In what light do the English show to best advantage in history?" a solemn Briton once asked the American Ambassador. "As ancestors to Americans," was the immediate response-a retort which really embodied the whole philosophy of his life. The intellectual and the literary were the predominant qualities in the youthful Page; he satisfied these aspirations by an education of the old-fashioned kind—at the Bingham School in North Carolina, at Randolph-Macon College in Virginia, at the newly opened Johns Hopkins, where he spent two years (1876-78) and had a fleeting glimpse of another young man who was to cut some figure in the world-then known |