PEACE-MAKING ERRORS SHOWN

In a speech before the annual meeting of the American Historical Association at Barnard College, Columbia University, last Thursday Professor Thomas A. Bailey, Stanford University historian, who is now teaching History 5, American history, at Harvard, outlined 22 "peace-making blunders" made by President Wilson.

Bailey said these blunders had "resulted in the most far-reaching consequences" and said we were faced with their repetition. Wilson's most tragic blunder, he said, was probably his "assumption (or was it a hope?) that mankind could attain a kind of international millenium at one bound. He confused the task of making peace with Germany, which was an immediate need, with that of remaking the world, which was the long-range need. The resulting treaty failed of both objectives."

But his supreme blunder, Bailey declared may be considered by some as "forcing the full text of the League Covenant into the Treaty, for Article X of the Covenant was the rock upon which the ratification finally floundered.... A brief statement committing the signatories to the general principles of the League and making specific provision for a commission to draw it up at a later date, as was done in the case of the World Court, would have insured the ratification of the Treaty and the framing of a covenant in a less hurried fashion and in a saner atmosphere. A League brought into being under these auspices, and after the election of 1920, might well have been approved by the Senate.