Everyone hates war, the senator stated at the start, and therefore it was time to lay aside the argument that if men differed over how to prevent one… - Arthur Herman

A. J. P. Taylor who said that the historian's inevitable task is to decide whether something that happened in history was a Good Thing or a Bad Thing.

Even after the president's testimony that the telegram was genuine, newspaper editors and some senators simply refused to believe it.

Mandates were largely a fiction, of course. The distinction between "mandate" and "colony," especially in highly colonized Africa, was meaningless. But the idea provided a fig leaf for Wilson's insistence that the Paris conference not become the tool of European imperialism. France and Britain accepted Wilson's phony compromise.