The
moral crisis of the war had arrived before the military decision was
in sight. All this President Wilson and his advisers realized. They
had not, of course, a perfect knowledge of the situation, but what I
have sketched they knew.
They knew also that the Allied Governments were bound by a series of
engagements that in letter and in spirit ran counter to the popular
conception of what the war was about. The resolutions of the Paris
Economic Conference were, of course, public property, and the network
of secret treaties had been published by the Bolsheviks in November of
1917. [Footnote: President Wilson stated at his conference with the
Senators that he had never heard of these treaties until he reached
Paris. That statement is perplexing. The Fourteen Points, as the text
shows, could not have been formulated without a knowledge of the
secret treaties. The substance of those treaties was before the
President when he and Colonel House prepared the final published text
of the Fourteen Points.] Their terms were only vaguely known to the
peoples, but it was definitely believed that they did not comport with
the idealistic slogan of self-determination, no annexations and no
indemnities. Popular questioning took the form of asking how many
thousand English lives Alsace-Lorraine or Dalmatia were worth, how
many French lives Poland or Mesopotamia were worth. Nor was such
questioning entirely unknown in America.
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