![]() ![]() European statesmen accepted the League, not as a plan by which Europe was to work out her salvation by herself, but as a coöperative world scheme in which the United States would have an integral part. The Europeans gave way, in deference to American wishes and against their own desires. But President Wilson wove the League into the fabric of the Treaty. At the best, they argued, it could not be workable until at least ten years after the Treaty was signed. Most of the practical politicians of Europe were in 1919 frankly skeptical of it. ![]() The idea of the League of Nations was conceived in the United States. As with the Treaty, so with the League of Nations. This suggestion occurs again and again, sometimes explicitly, but more frequently by implication in the use of such words as ‘betrayal’ and ‘dodging’ as descriptive of our failure to ratify.Ĭopyright 1929, by The Atlantic Monthly Company. The Senatorial prerogative of vetoing or ratifying a treaty, - of which the European people have heard so much since the war, - however real to us, is in European eyes only a pretext. Having accepted what they considered in substance an ‘American Treaty,’ the people of the Allied countries were amazed and disheartened to learn, later, that the United States declined to honor it. The Allied Powers, so they say, sacrificed their better judgment and some of their plain interests to sign a Peace Treaty largely designed by President Wilson, because they wished to respect what they believed to be the wishes of the United States. They consider that we failed them in that.Ģ. ![]() The enemy countries had counted upon us to effect a magnanimous peace in the spirit of President Wilson’s fourteen points. Europe, facing the realities of the aftermath, began to count the cost of war. It was inevitable that reaction should set in when peace came. Europe clearly does not see America as America sees herself. To-day these hopes and expectations are replaced by a complex of suspicion, misunderstanding, and fear. The peoples of Europe counted upon us, as the clear-eyed and confident architects of a New World, to help them replace the European system with something nearer their hearts’ desire. That emotion - heightened by the arrival of our troops in France - came to its climax when Woodrow Wilson appeared in person in Europe to meet everywhere demonstrations of passionate and popular fervor such as have not been equaled in our time. The generosity of the American people touched the imagination of the whole world and aroused an unparalleled feeling of good will toward us everywhere. We brought hope to peoples who had almost ceased to hope. In 1917, Europe saw us suddenly, dramatically, in a time of extraordinary emotional tension, as the heaven-sent deliverer, heroic in stature, ardent, young, dauntless, irresistible, and, above all, splendidly just. ELEVEN years ago, the United States of America came out of its remote isolation - in European eyes - to loom upon the horizon as the hope of the world. ![]()
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