See how it looked in 1919

League of Nations Idea Accepted by Peace Conference

President Wilson Leads Historic Discussion of League Important Resolutions Passed on Indemnities and Penalties

By Special Cable to The Christian Science Monitor for its European News Office

London, England (Sunday) –

Saturday’s meeting of the peace conference was the most important since that body commenced its sittings. Four important groups of resolutions were carried. The first dealt with the question of the League of Nations; the second of indemnity; the third with the future of international labor and industrial legislation; and the fourth with an international regime of ports, waterways, and railways.

Tremendously important as were the two last, it is with the two first that the world in most concerned actually at the moment. The second resolution made it perfectly clear that the Central Powers are to be called upon for indemnity, the only question remaining to be settled being the amount and method of payment. It was therefore with the first that the Congress and the world were most concerned, and the interest with which President Wilson, Mr. Lloyd George, Signor Orlando, and M. Bourgeois were listened to was proof sufficient of this.

It was just after three o’clock when President Wilson rose to explain the project by which the conference hopes to render impossible the future perpetration of such crimes as the late war. This war, President Wilson pointed out in the course of his speech, had been prepared, not only in the barracks yards or the arsenal, but in the laboratories, studies, and lecture rooms of Germany. The very seats of learning, he insisted, had been placed under contribution for purposes of waging war, so that it had become necessary that science, as well as militarism, should in future be kept under the control of civilization.

For this purpose the League of Nations had been conceived, and for this purpose, the powers represented at the Peace Conference, were determined that the League of Nations should become an accomplished fact. Not that, as President Wilson pointed out, the question was one of governments. It had passed for beyond that; it had become a question of peoples. The conscience of the world demanded such a step, and it was necessary that its conscience should be satisfied. The war had been much more than a war of armies, it has been a war of peoples. The strain had been thrown back from the front upon the old men, the women, and he children far in the rear, and had fallen ultimately on the hearts of mankind. Therefore the suffering of the world had laid a solemn obligation upon the conference to make permanent provision for justice and for peace.

As for the United States itself, though it was in the war, it had not come into the war with any intention of interfering in the politics of Europe or Asia. Still, being in the war, it would feel that its part had been played in vain if the war should end in a mere body of European settlements. On the other hand, it could not take part in guaranteeing those settlements unless the guarantee involved continuous superintendence of the peace of the world by the associated nation of the world. Thus President Wilson introduced the subject of the League of Nations.

No sooner had he sat down and the translation of his speech been read then Mr. Lloyd George rose to support him. It was unnecessary for him, the British Prime Minister said, to add anything to the President’s speech, beyond the fact that the whole British Empire was behind the proposal that had been made, and that if the statesmen of the Empire had not been able to pay that attention of the League of Nations, which it deserved, it was because the responsibilities of war had been too terrific to permit that attention. Still, Mr. Lloyd George continued, if he had ever had a shadow of a doubt of the necessity of a League of Nations, it would have vanished before the hideous scene of the desolation which he had viewed in the devastated regions of Northern France amid scenes which no indemnities could ever make good. These scenes of demolished cemeteries, had left upon him an impression that some method of settling disputes arising between civilized nations must be found, other than that of organized slaughter.
Mr. Lloyd George was followed by Signor Orland and M. León Bourgeois, and then by the Chinese and Polish delegates.
Then a resolution was put to the conference and carried unanimously. Meantime, while the discussion of the League of Nations is occupying the Peace Conference, an attempt to bring about a meeting of the Russian political groups seems to be breaking down. Non-Bolshevistic groups are apparently determined in no way to recognize the Bolsheviks, whilst the Bolsheviks seem inclined to use the proposal as propaganda for their own ends. In such circumstances, negotiations may go on until sheer exhaustion or something worse overwhelms the Russian people and the end of Bolshevism comes by its working out its own destruction.