Opera House in New York in which his latest conception of the duties of
the Peace Conference was set forth. He had realized that peace without
victory was unsafe in view of the character of the German Government;
it must be a peace with guarantees, for nobody would trust the Germans.
But it must be a peace of impartial justice, "involving no
discrimination between those to whom we wish to be just and those to
whom we do not wish to be just," and the guarantee must be provided by
a League of Nations which the Peace Conference itself--and not a
subsequent general conference, as the President had held in the days of
his neutrality--must organize. The development was logical; nearly all
the American powers had entered the war, and neutrals were far less
numerous than in 1916. And he argued that the League of Nations must be
formed at the Peace Conference, to be "in a sense the most essential
part" of its work, because it was not likely that it could be formed
after the conference, and if formed during the war it would only be an
alliance of the powers associated against Germany.

The Germans apparently thought these pronouncements offered some hope.
Their Government was hastily being covered with a false front of
democratic institutions to suit his insistence, and on Oct. 4 the new
Chancellor, Prince Max of Baden, appealed to the President to call a
peace conference at once, the basis of peace to be the Fourteen Points
and conditions set forth in the President's later addresses,
specifically that of Sept. 27. There ensued an interchange of notes
lasting throughout an entire month, in which the President acted
nominally as intermediary between the Germans and the Allies, though
actually he was in constant touch with allied statesmen. What began as
a duel of diplomatic dexterity presently developed into a German
diplomatic rout as the German armies, retreating everywhere, drew
nearer and nearer German soil. Positions which the German Government
had hoped to defend were successively abandoned; the Germans agreed to
accept without argument the Fourteen Points, with discussion at the
conference limited only to details of their practical application, and
to recognize the alterations which had been made in some of them by
subsequent decisions of the American Government. They accepted the
President's insistence that a peace conference must be conditional on
an armistice which would imply complete evacuation of allied territory
and