enlisted in the terrible struggle to end the hideous immorality and unmorality of militarism, to restore stolen goods and to further the establishment of governments in accordance with the will of those governed.

France sought Alsace-Lorraine as a measure of justice. Italy sought the Trentino and Trieste on the same ground. The United States and Great Britain sought the acquisition of no new territory. Great Britain has indicated that she does not desire the return of Helgoland, that island off the mouth of the Elbe which Lord Salisbury sold to Germany and which has proved so formidable a naval outpost of the German empire in this war.

The question as to the German colonies, however, has raised a doubt among some whether Great Britain will adhere religiously to the attitude of seeking no additional territory. Germany has colonies in East and West Africa of large extent. She has a colony of large area in the neighborhood of Australia, part of the island of New Guinea. The Australians, the New Zealanders and the South Africans among the English colonists object to the return of these colonies to Germany, because Germany's ownership of them has been a threat to Australia and New Zealand and has required special defenses by them.

It is to be inferred from the clearly proved outrageous treatment by Germany of her colonists that the Peace Conference in Versailles will conclude that none of her colonies should be returned to Germany. ministered for the benefit of the colonies. The treatment of these peoples is of a piece with the atrocious conduct of the Germans in this war.

They have not been adbackward peoples in the

Under the principles laid down in the fourteen points, therefore, the only question which the conferees can take up

is how shall these colonies be administered. That they are not now capable of self-government goes without saying. The Australians and New Zealanders would doubtless wish that the German colony in New Guinea should be taken over by Great Britain. The South African English colonists will probably seek the same result.

It would be too bad for Britain to yield to the urgings of her daughters in this regard. She cannot afford to do it. It will arouse at once the attack that she is exhibiting the same land-grabbing propensities which have been charged to her in the past.

There is no argument making more strongly for the establishment and maintenance of a league of nations in connection with this treaty than the need of a proper method of providing for these German colonies. They should be governed by an agency of the league of nations charged with the duty of educating the natives, leading them on in the paths of civilization and extending self-government to them as rapidly as their fitness will permit. They will thus prove to the world the equitable and just motives and aims of the nations who frame the provisions of this epoch-making treaty.

THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY 1

The earnest effort of the Jews of the United States to induce our executive to remedy the intolerable condition of their co-religionists in the backward countries of Europe has often been met and defeated by the argument that our 1 Article in Public Ledger Dec. 17, 1918.

government can not interfere with the domestic affairs of another nation. This argument has little if any application to the present situation. There is much evidence accumulating to show that the pogroms and abuses of the Jews continue in the countries where they have heretofore existed, and that the chaotic and lawless condition in these countries has offered an opportunity for the cruel gratification of race and religious prejudice. On the whole, it is not too much to say that the people of the Jewish race have suffered more in this war, as noncombatants, than any other people, unless it be the Serbians and the Armenians.

In Poland and in Galicia the true story of their agonies and losses is heartrending. The five nations who are to draft the treaty at Versailles are setting up governments in Poland, in the Ukraine and in the Baltic provinces. In all of these the Jewish population is a substantial percentage of the whole. In their sad story we find the Jews in the Middle Ages seeking refuge from the oppression and cruelty of Western Europe and rushing to the great empire of Poland, then stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea, to take advantage of a charter of religious tolerance and opportunity granted by one of the liberal Polish kings. The irony of fate, however, ended the Polish kingdom and a large part of it was turned over to Russia, which ground the Jews under its tyrannous heel. This is why half of the thirteen millions of Jews living in the world were at the beginning of this war to be found in the Russian pale in which Jews were permitted to live, to which they were limited, and which was practically coterminous with the territory which Russia had taken from old Poland.

One of the great projects of this Congress of Powers at Versailles is to set up independent governments in these ter

ritories of the Russian Jewish pale. We shall be derelict in our duty if we do not require, as part of the fundamental law of these new republics, that the Jews shall have as great religious freedom as they have in the United States. But we must do more. We must have a league of nations to see to it that such fundamental law exacted by the treaty shall be enforced. We find full precedent for such a provision in the law in the treaty made by the Congress of Berlin, in which Bulgaria and Rumania were established as independent countries. Rumania, which had long been a heinous sinner against the Jews, was forced by the Berlin Congress to accept, as part of its constitution, a declaration that there should be complete religious freedom and that no citizen should be discriminated against on account of his religion in any respect. The Rumanian government had the audacity, after incorporating the guaranty in its fundamental law, to declare and hold that Jews who had lived in Rumania for two or three hundred years, father and son, were aliens. In this way the protection of the Jews provided for in the treaty of Berlin was denied, and this was after Rumania had secured recognition as a government on an additional promise of fair treatment of the Jews.

Let us have no farcical result in working out this treaty of Versailles. Could we find a stronger argument for the continuance of our league of nations than this ignominious failure of that congress of 1879, under the presidency of Bismarck, to carry out its declared purpose? If there be any people who should be earnestly in favor of a league of nations as the outgrowth and the condition of this treaty now being framed at Versailles the Jews are that people.

PRESIDENT WILSON AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS1

President Wilson says that the statement of the Chicago Tribune that, before sailing, he approved the plan of the League to Enforce Peace is untrue and that he never directly or indirectly indorsed the plan. It is not believed that any one, for the American League, ever claimed that he did. From what he has said, however, he has given the world reason to believe that he favored action by a league of nations to achieve results only to be brought about along the lines of the American League to Enforce Peace. He has, because of his addresses and messages on the subject, come to be regarded as the foremost champion of a league of nations to maintain peace after this war. It is the confident belief of the people of France that he has attended the conference in order to secure such a league which prompts their enthusiastic and affectionate acclaim. He will do well to bear this in mind. He must not give the word of promise to the ear and break it to the hope. He has spoken so much on the objects of this war, he has laid down in a didactic form so many principles in their application to all the peoples in the sphere of the war, he has pictured with such eloquence the idealistic results for the freedom, justice and peace of the large and small nations affected by the war, that if he now fails to propose and secure in the treaty practical machinery for a real league of nations, which shall enforce peace, he will properly be held responsible for a lame and impotent conclusion before the world and its expectant peoples.

Mr. Wilson is master of an inspiring style of promise, in 1 Article in Public Ledger Dec. 23, 1918.