File No. 763.72119/684
The Acting Secretary of State to the French Ambassador ( Jusserand )
Excellency: I did not fail to communicate to the President, upon its receipt, your note of the 20th ultimo,1 stating that Mr. Ribot, President of the Council, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the French Republic, is giving his attention to finding out how a society of nations could be brought into existence, and that it is his intention to convene a commission charged with the duty of examining the question, but that, before coming to any decision in that respect, the French Government would be glad to have the views of President Wilson with regard to the undertaking.
Noting the intention of Mr. Ribot to assemble at some early date a commission to consider the feasibility, the form, and the objects of a society of nations, the President, in response to Mr. Ribot’s gracious wish for an expression of his opinion, expresses the fear that such a commission, if constituted at this time, would be premature and unnecessarily introduce new subjects of discussion and perhaps of difference of view among the nations associated against Germany. The President’s own idea has been that such a society of nations would of necessity be an evolution rather than a creation by formal convention. It has been his hope and expectation that the war would result in certain definite covenants and guarantees entered into by the free nations of the world for the purpose of safeguarding their own security and the general peace of the world and that in the very process of carrying these covenants into execution from time to time a machinery and practice of cooperation would naturally spring up which would in the end produce something which would in effect be a regularly constituted and employed concert of nations. To begin with a discussion of how such a concert or society should be constituted, under the presidency of which nation, with what common force and under what common command, etc., etc., would be likely to produce jealousies and difficulties which need not be faced now.
Accept [etc]