mention this as indicative of the state of uncertainty in which he was
in the spring of 1916 as to the functions and powers of the
international organization to maintain peace which he then advocated. By
January, 1917, he had become convinced that the use of force was the
practical method of checking aggressions. This conversion was probably
due to the fact that he had in his own mind worked out, as one of the
essential bases of peace, to which he was then giving much thought, a
mutual guaranty of territorial integrity and political independence,
which had been the chief article of a proposed Pan-American Treaty
prepared early in 1915 and to which he referred in his address before
the League to Enforce Peace. He appears to have reached the conclusion
that a guaranty of this sort would be of little value unless supported
by the threatened, and, if necessary, the actual, employment of force.
The President was entirely logical in this attitude. A guaranty against
physical aggression would be practically worthless if it did not rest on
an agreement to protect with physical force. An undertaking to protect
carried with it the idea of using effectual measures to insure
protection. They were inseparable; and the President, having adopted an
affirmative guaranty against aggression as a cardinal provision--perhaps
I should say _the_ cardinal provision--of the anticipated peace treaty,
could not avoid becoming the advocate of the use of force in making good
the guaranty.

During the year 1918 the general idea of the formation of an
international organization to prevent war was increasingly discussed in
the press of the United States and Europe and engaged the thought of the
Governments of the Powers at war with the German Empire. On January 8 of
that year President Wilson in an address to Congress proclaimed his
"Fourteen Points," the adoption of which he considered necessary to a
just and stable peace. The last of these "Points" explicitly states the