PRESIDENT WILSON AND THE PEACE CONFERENCE.

New Zealand Tablet, 11 March 1920, Page 28

PRESIDENT WILSON AND THE PEACE CONFERENCE.

The fact that no representative of the working class was present at the Peace Conference doomed it to failure, declared Oswald Garrison Villard, editor of the Nation, recently at a public forum in New York. Relating his experience while representing the Nation at the Conference, the editor said the only hop© for the world was a real league of nations. "What we want," Villard said, "is an international parliament of representatives of the working classes as well as other classes." Only a league based on absolute disarmament and with a. genuine desire to help the stricken people of Europe, fashioned not by diplomats but by representatives of the people, can bring the world out of its present chaos, the speaker declared. The Peace Conference failed because it was a league of Governments instead of a league of nations. Villard presented a dismal picture of President Wilson to his hearers. He came away with "an inhumane and barbarous treaty" instead of his democratic principles, said the ( editor. Tho speaker described the Peace gathering as "no conference at all," bacause of the 250 delegates, at first ten, then five, four, and finally but three guided .the destinies of the Conference. He felt disappointed, Villard said, when he discovered that no workingmau, no woman, and no representative of the colored races was numbered among the Peace commissioners who were deciding the fate of the world. Tin* Conference' was doomed from the first (he continued), because the same diplomats who "cooked up" the war were trying to pull the world out of the catastrophe. Because Wilson made no fight upon his first point of •open covenants openly arrived at," when newspaper men were kept out of the Peace parley by Clemenceau and Lloyd George, it gave insight into Wilson's real character, Villard said, and the Allied diplomats then knew that it was an easy thing to trim him. Villard asserted that the League of Nations was drafted by a law partner of the son-in-law of Colonel House and an English journalist named Hirst. It was this pact that Wilson demanded be accepted in its entirety. Villard added. "If the Conference had been a poker game." Villard continued, "Wilson would have come home without even his clothes." There was no reason for Wilson's failure other than that he lacked moral fibre, the editor asserted, because America entered the Conference with the "big cards" —the finest army, food, ships, and money. Had Wilson threatened to go home, revolution would have occurred in many European countries, Villard maintained. Instead Wilson returned beaten. "The peace existing to-day following the Conference's work is a covenant with death because of the spirit of revenge left in Russia, Germany, Austria, and other countries," Villard added.