soon comes to mean pretty nearly everything. Mr. Wilson's phrases were understood in endlessly different ways in every corner of the earth. No document negotiated and made of public record existed to correct the confusion.[1] And so, when the day of settlement came, everybody expected everything. The European authors of the treaty had a large choice, and they chose to realize those expectations which were held by those of their countrymen who wielded the most power at home.
They came down the hierarchy from the Rights of Humanity to the Rights of France, Britain and Italy. They did not abandon the use of symbols. They abandoned only those which after the war had no permanent roots in the imagination of their constituents. They preserved the unity of France by the use of symbolism, but they would not risk anything for the unity of Europe. The symbol France was deeply attached, the symbol Europe had only a recent history. Nevertheless the distinction between an omnibus like Europe and a symbol like France is not sharp. The history of states and empires reveals times when the scope of the unifying idea increases and also times when it shrinks. One cannot say that men have moved consistently from smaller loyalties to larger ones, because the facts will not bear out the claim. The Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire bellied out further than those national unifications in the Nineteenth Century from which believers in a World State argue by analogy. Never-
- ↑ The American interpretation of the fourteen points was explained to the allied statesmen just before the armistice.
