"Woodrow Wilson and World Settle.
ment." By Bay Stannard Baker.
Two volumes. (Heinemann, 36s.)
Interest in the details of the Paris Peacd Comference is not quite so vivid as it was, but Mr. Baker has quite enough new material to make has book indispensable to students of the story. He has had the "yun"? of all President Wilson's Papers to supplement his own observation as manager of the American—Delegation's Press Bureau, and many of the discussions take on a picturesque and even ironical quality in the extended form which he is able to give them.
The weakness of the book is that Mr. Baker has felt either inspired oe: compelled to frame it in eccordance with the strict requirements of melodrama—to paint "a pretty dark picture" of transactions in which no nation but America intervened with clean hands and a pure heart. It is easy to take 2 disinterested attitude in affairs in which one is not conscious of having any interests at stake, but it would have been am exhibition of positively superhuman virtue if the European Powers had, in their attempt to reconstruct the world, shown no special tenderness for their own) rights, ambitions, and. responsibilities. Even his own country in the long run, as the author admits, put "America first'? by repudiating the Treaty, the League, and all concern with the old world, and has only come back towards the Wilsonian standard after discovering that isolation and welfare do not keep such close company as was supposed. The author shows great admiration for a remark of the President's that ideals units men, while interests separate them. The Wars of Religion searcely bear it out, and current history seems to promise that a diffused sense of economic dangers will provide a, firmer basis of common policy than did the Fourteen Points of five years ago.
The real, though unconscious, trend of the book is to show how—even granted "the antiquated and evil system of the old diplomacy"—President Wilson was _peculiar'; disabled from being the designer
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.