not to be urged as to a matter concerning which he had
expressed his opinion. To give implied assent to policies and intentions
which seemed to me wrong or unwise would have been violative of a public
trust, though doubtless by remaining silent I might have won favor and
approval from the President and retained his confidence.

In summarizing briefly the subjects of disagreement between the
President and myself concerning the League of Nations I will follow the
order of importance rather than the order in which they arose. While
they also divide into two classes, those based on principle and those
based on policy, it does not seem advisable to treat them by classes in
the summary.

The most serious defect in the President's Covenant was, in my opinion,
one of principle. It was the practical denial of the equality of nations
in the regulation of international affairs in times of peace through the
recognition in the Executive Council of the League of the right of
primacy of the Five Great Powers. This was an abandonment of a
fundamental principle of international law and comity and was
destructive of the very conception of national sovereignty both as a
term of political philosophy and as a term of constitutional law. The
denial of the equal independence and the free exercise of sovereign
rights of all states in the conduct of their foreign affairs, and the
establishment of this group of primates, amounted to a recognition of
the doctrine that the powerful are, in law as well as in fact, entitled
to be the overlords of the weak. If adopted, it legalized the mastery of
might, which in international relations, when peace prevailed, had been
universally condemned as illegal and its assertion as reprehensible.

It was this doctrine, that the possessors of superior physical power
were as a matter of right the supervisors, if not the dictators, of
those lacking the physical power to resist their commands, which was the
vital element of ancient imperialism and of modern Prussianism. Belief
in it as a true theory of world polity justified the Great War in the
eyes of the German people even when they doubted the plea of their
Government that their national safety was in peril. The victors,
although they had fought the war with the announced purpose of proving
the falsity of this pernicious doctrine and of emancipating the
oppressed nationalities subject to the Central Powers, revived the
doctrine with little hesitation during t