What would you think of replying to him in the sense of the enclosed
memorandum?
I have tried my hand at a restatement of the bases. What do you think of
the result? All that we can hope for is to agree upon definite things
and rely on experience and subsequent exchanges of treaty agreement to
develop and remove the practical difficulties.
[Enclosure]
Memorandum by President Wilson
Bases of Peace
I
Mutual guarantee of political independence,—absolute in all domestic
matters, limited in external affairs only by the equal rights of
other nations.
[Page 23]
II
Mutual guarantee of territorial integrity.
Note. The application of this guarantee to
the territorial arrangements made by the terms of the peace by which
the present war is to be ended would, of course, necessarily depend
upon the character of those arrangements, that is, upon their
reasonableness and natural prospect of permanency; and, so far as
the participation of the United States in the guarantee is
concerned, would depend upon whether they were in conformity with
the general principles of right and comity which the President set
forth in his address to the Senate on the twenty-second of
January.
Such a guarantee would not affect natural expansion peaceably
accomplished.
III
Mutual agreement not to take part in any joint economic action by two
or more nations which would in effect constitute an effort to
throttle the industrial life of any nation or shut it off from fair
and equal opportunities of trade with the nations thus in concert or
with the rest of the world.
Note. This would of course not apply, as
its terms indicate, to the laws of an individual state intended for
the regulation and development of its own industries or for the
safeguarding of its own resources from misuse or exhaustion, but
only to cooperative action between states intended or which would
operate to injure particular rivals or groups of rivals.
IV
Mutual agreement to limit armaments, whether on land or sea, to the
necessities of internal order (including, of course, the internal
order of an empire) and the probable demands of cooperation in
making good the foregoing guarantees and agreements.
Note. Provided the
nations which take part in these covenants may reasonably be
regarded as representing the major force of mankind.
General Note. It is suggested that it
would not be necessary to set up at the outset any permanent
tribunal or administrative agency, but only an office of
correspondence through which all matters of information could be
cleared up, correspondence translated by competent scholars, and
mutual explanations and suggestions exchanged. It would in all
likelihood be best, in this matter of executive organization, to
await the developments and lessons of experience before attempting
to set up any common instrumentality of international action.
[Page 24]
Points To Be Made in Reply to the Suggestion of
the Swiss Federal Council
The probable physical impossibility of holding an actual
conference.
The embarrassments which it is now evident many neutral governments
would feel in seeming to come together to influence the present
course of events.
The desirability, nevertheless, of a frank interchange of views.
Suggestion, therefore, that the Swiss
Federal Council communicate to the Government of the United States
its views as to any present feasible course of cooperative action
and any common bases upon which neutrals might at this time draw
together in a League of Peace. The United States would be very glad
in its turn, or at the invitation of the Council, to submit its own
views on these vital and important subjects.
