In regard to the League of Nations, Mr. Lloyd George was never the prime mover, but always a faithful follower of President Wilson. Thus it was that Mr. Lloyd George never framed a scheme, but took the schemes of others as the basis for his advice and counsel. He profoundly believed in the League of Nations as the only way out for the human race. But he had not a very deep faith in schemes or constitutions. His idea was rather, in the good old British way, to evolve a League from the Peace Conference. He had in mind the precedent of the Imperial Conference, and he believed that periodical meetings of the Peace Conference, gradually including nations at first excluded, would lead to a slow growth of understanding between nations now too ardent for sovereignty to be affected by any decisions from Paris or Geneva.
President Wilson brought to Paris a scheme which he had already worked out. He had based it on the Phillimore Report amended by Colonel House, and rewritten by himself.[135] He then read General Smuts’s remarkable memorandum, and revised his scheme again. That scheme was considered at an early meeting of the Conference and referred to a League of Nations Committee. President Wilson himself sat on the Committee along with Mr. Lansing, thus giving up to the creation of the Covenant a large part of his great energies and genius. Lord Robert Cecil was placed on the Committee as the British Representative by Mr. Balfour, and we know what a great part he played. Lord Robert was in frequent consultation with Mr. Lloyd George, who always kept in close touch with the drafting of the Covenant, and made many suggestions. When the Covenant was in danger, he supported President Wilson on his return from America in his insistence that it should be made part of the Treaty. Still, Mr. Lloyd George perhaps never shook off his instinctive feeling that there was an element of unreality in the drafting of a set constitution for the League. He doubted whether the intense patriotism created by the war could at once be poured, glowing hot, into the mould of a new international discipline. The action of Italy, and still more of the United States itself, seems since to have given some confirmation to his view.