peace without victory." He said that "victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor's terms imposed upon the vanquished." Such a peace wou… - Arthur Herman

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.

It was Wilson and Wilson alone who was the source of the problems that haunted the Peace Conference and, afterward, the Treaty of Versailles.

An evident principle runs through the whole program I have outlined. It is the principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another.