THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK • BOSTON CHICAGO DALLAS ATLANTA SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED LONDON. BOMBAY CALCUTTA THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD. TORONTO ARTHUR SWEETSER Of the American Peace Commission and the Provisional 0 New York 1920 All rights reserved PREFACE I feel it is owed to those who chance to read this little book to preface it with a few personal words. For in a subject so controversial as the League of Nations the public has the right to know with what purpose and with what authority a writer presumes to ask its attention. It so happens that I have had access to facts which I believe throw an entirely different interpretation upon the League than that almost universally held, as I saw the League at birth in Paris when a member of the American Peace Commission; saw it under development in London as a member of the Provisional Secretariat; and finally saw it in its first world conference in Washington as a member of the staff of the International Labor Conference. The genesis of this little book lay in a series of articles written for the New York Evening Post at that very extraordinary moment when nine Americans out of every ten took it for granted V |