when Italy entered the war, above all by the Treaty of London which excluded Papal representatives from the Peace Conference. Thereupon, with the support of Austria and Germany, a scheme was set on foot to secure for the Roman Curia a stretch of territory along the Tiber to the sea, so that Papal diplomatists might not be obliged to pass through Italy. This scheme was zealously ventilated in the press during 1916 and 1917.
The pro-Austrian views and temper which persisted in official Allied circles up to the spring of 1918 are most clearly revealed by President Wilson’s declarations. In his Message to Congress on January 8, 1918, which contained his Fourteen Points, his allusions to Austria-Hungary were still pro-Austrian. His tenth Point ran: “The peoples of Austria-Hungary, whose place among the nations we wish to see safeguarded and assured, should be accorded the freest opportunity of autonomous development”; and President Wilson invoked the British declaration of January 5, 1918, in which the Prime Minister, Mr. Lloyd George, had assured a Trade Union meeting that the destruction of Austria-Hungary was not a British war aim.
In his “Fourteen Points” President Wilson repeated more precisely what he had said on December 4, 1917, when explaining to Congress the significance of the American Declaration of War upon Austria-Hungary. Even then, in declaring war, the burden of his indictment was against Germany. Of Austria he said that her peoples, like those of the Balkans and of Turkey, must be freed from the shameless alien rule, the military and commercial autocracy of Prussia. He added: “We owe it to ourselves to declare that we do not wish to weaken or to transform the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. How it may wish to live politically or industrially is not our concern. We neither intend nor desire to dictate to it in anything. We wish only that the affairs of its peoples, in great things and small, may remain in their own hands.”
This speech expressed the view that Austria should be freed from Prussian overlordship— view which Professor Herron, one of Wilson’s confidential advisers, used to expound in Switzerland. As late as the autumn of 1918, Herron told an Austrian emissary, Dr. Lammasch, that America opposed Austria solely because Austria stood by Germany, but felt no hostility whatever against Austria herself. President Wilson’s view of the Austrian relationship to Germany is the only explanation of the significant fact that the United States
