every effort to interpret them in terms of purely national
self-interest. This he regarded as the greatest difficulty to be met at
Paris. The second difficulty lay in the extreme demands that were being
made by the smaller nationalities, now liberated from Teuton dominion or
overlordship. Poland, Rumania, Serbia, Greece, were all asking for
territory which could only be assigned to them on the ancient principle of
the division of spoils among the victors. The spirit of nationalism which
had played a role of so much importance in the antecedents of the war, as
well as in the downfall of the Central Empires, now threatened to ruin the
peace. As we have seen, it was partly because of this second danger that
Wilson agreed to the exclusion of the smaller states from the Supreme
Council of the Allies.

Upon the details of the treaties, whether of an economic or a territorial
character, the President did not at first lay great stress. He was
interested chiefly in the spirit that lay behind the treaties. The peace,
he insisted, must be one of justice and, if possible, one of
reconciliation. More concretely, the great point of importance was the
establishment of a League of Nations; for the President believed that
only through the building up of a new international system, based upon
the concert of all democratic states, could permanent justice and amity
be secured. Only a new system could suffice to prevent the injustice
that great states work upon small, and to stamp out the germs of future
war. It would be the single specific factor that would make this treaty
different from and better than treaties of the past. The ultimate origin
of the great war was less to be sought in the aspirations and malevolence
of Germany, he believed, than in the disorganized international system of
Europe. Unless that were radically reformed, unless a regime of
diplomatic cooeperation were substituted for the Balance of Power, neither
justice nor peace could last. The old system had failed too often.

Wilson does not seem to have formulated definitely before he reached
Paris the kind of League which he desired to see created. He was opposed
to such intricate machinery as that proposed by the League to Enforce
Peace, and favored an extremely simple organization which might evolve
naturally to meet conditions of the future. The chief organ of a League,
he felt, should be an executive council, possibly composed of the
ambassadors to some small neutr