tral Alliance seemed almost out of the question.

In addition to the advantage to be gained by postponing the
determination of the details of the organization until the theory, the
form, the purposes and the powers of the proposed League could be
thoroughly considered, it would make possible the speedy restoration of
a state of peace. There can be no doubt that peace at the earliest
possible moment was the supreme need of the world. The political and
social chaos in the Central Empires, due to the overthrow of their
strong autocratic governments and the prevailing want, suffering, and
despair, in which the war had left their peoples, offered a fertile
field for the pernicious doctrines of Bolshevism to take root and
thrive. A proletarian revolution seemed imminent. The Spartacists in
Germany, the Radical Socialists in Austria, and the Communists in
Hungary were the best organized and most vigorous of the political
groups in those countries and were conducting an active and seemingly
successful propaganda among the starving and hopeless masses, while the
Russian duumvirs, Lenine and Trotsky, were with funds and emissaries
aiding these movements against established authority and social order.
Eastern Europe seemed to be a volcano on the very point of eruption.
Unless something was speedily done to check the peril, it threatened to
spread to other countries and even to engulf the very foundations of
modern civilization.

A restoration of commercial relations and of normal industrial
conditions through the medium of a treaty of peace appeared to offer the
only practical means of resisting these movements and of saving Europe
from the horrors of a proletarian despotism which had brought the
Russian people to so low a state. This was the common judgment of those
who at that time watched with increasing impatience the slow progress of
the negotiations at Paris and with apprehension the political turmoil in
the defeated and distracted empires of Central Europe.

An immediate restoration of peace was, as I then saw it, of vital
importance to the world as it was the universal demand of all mankind.
To delay it for the purpose of completing the organization of a League
of Nations or for any other purpose than the formulation of terms
essential to peace seemed to me to be taking a risk as to the future
wholly unwarranted by the relative importance of the subjects. There is
no question, in the light of subsequent events, that the