Evening Post. WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 1920. WILSON'S "BOMBSHELL"

Evening Post, Volume XCIX, Issue 41, 18 February 1920, Page 4

Evening Post. WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 1920. WILSON'S "BOMBSHELL"

President Wilson's Note to Britain and France, threatening to withdraw the Peace Treaty from the Senate if a Fiume settlement is completed without American participation, comes as a weakening diversion in the Allied Camp, just at the time when the Allies need all their strength if: they are to defeat those forces that are bent on keeping the ex-Kaiser in Holland., the Sultan in Constantinople, and the minor warcriminals in Germany If President Wilson had wished to protect Wilhelm in Dutch "sanctuary,". Mohammed in Stamboul, and the German murderers in the Fatherland, he could not have timed his Note to better purpose. For the sake of the Wilson Idea in the Adriatic, he is willing to compromise the other three great issues, and to endanger fresh issues that will certainly arise, and which will need the united action ' of, the -Allied and Associated Powers if they are to be treated as firmly as they should be. The question is : Is the Wilson Idea in the Adriatic worth all the damage that is being done, in other directions, by the "bombshell" that the President has dropped into the Allies' camp? Is the Wilson Idea worth fighting for, and is America prepared to fight for it? If not, what good purpose will the President serve by raising in so petulant a. manner the flag of secession?

It is true that President Wilson, after making his threat, shows some disposition to declare, or to allow his entourage to declare, that it is not a threat. But the academic question—when is a threat not a threat?—is too trivial to bo worth pursuing at a time when it is plain that, whatever intentions the author of the Note may have had, or whatever regretful afterthoughts may have come to him, the damage done by his action is real and unmistakable. It appears that the President supports certain Adriatic proposals dated 9th December, and opposes certain other proposals dated 20th January, the adoption of which—according to 6ne version of his Note—might compel him to withdraw the Peace Treaty from the Senate. What the difference in substance is between the two sets of proposals we do not know. So far as we are aware, they have not been made public; and it may be that, in strict justice and according to ethnological and moral canons, the proposals approved by the President may be superior to those that he disapproves. But the question is not merely whether the Jugo-Slavs- should have a little more or a little less. The question is whether America is prepared to guarantee them, against Italy, the little more that the President considers them to be entitled to; or whether she only proposes to put a spoke in the wheel, and to prevent the whole of the machinery revolving in a Continent whose hundreds of millions of people, torn by years of warfaro and longing for settled government, are still threatened by famine, anarchy, and Bolshevism. Is President Wilson prepared not merely to criticise but to reconstruct? Or is lie passively challenging a lesser evil at the risk of precipitating a greater one?

In considering tho unctuous rectitude of America in relation to tho Adriatic, it must always be remembered that Britain is embarrassed by a- -war-bargain which she was practically forced to make in order to secure Italy's entry ii'.tc> tins \vi\r against Gernuuiy. At that time America .was on, the fence, gad it

appeared that Britain and France might be compelled to pay almost any price to secure Italy's assistance at a very critical stage of a conflict with enemies who were then in their military prime. If the price paid was too high, if it was higher than is now deemed to be compatible with the national ambitions of the new Jugo-Slav nation, no judgment is just that does not consider the difference in time and circumstance since Italy imposed her bargain on Britain and France. It certainly does not lie in the mguth of America to be over-criti-cal of diplomatic agreements contracted by belligerents to whom at the time she was rendering no active aid. Had President Wilson brought the United States into the war in 1915, befoi'e the diplo-ma-tic basis of the Adriatic bargain was laid, that would have been the time for 'effeotive American intervention, militarily reinforced. But to pose now as a higher critic is to win no laurels. And to appear as a. mere obstructionist, with no constructional alternative, is to add nothing to the solution of the grave problem with which Europe is confronted.