George Lours Beek
 

Commonwealth and the U.S.A. If we hold aloof, it will be an empty shell and I am afraid, further, that the eco¬
nomic necessities of Europe and the desire for security against Germany will lead to measures that will drive a
wedge deep between us and the British Commonwealth. Excuse the dogmatic lone of this last paragraph. It
embodies only some of my fears and — hopes, and I wanted to get them off before I was called to dinner too
often.

Will vou give Mrs. Shonvell and the young ladies my best regards and good wishes for the holidays and the com¬
ing year and retain a good measure youi"self.
 

Most Cordially,
George Louis Beer
 

(M55(^cks
 

Beer died, al age 47, on March 15, 1920. Four
days later, the Treaty of Versailles was put to its
fourth and final vote in the Senate, where it failed
to receive the two-thirds majority necessary for rat¬
ification. The United States, of course, did not
join the League of Nations, and as Beer had fore¬
seen, the world headed "for a period of interna¬
tional anarchy of indefinite duration and full of
strife and wars." However, no one can say with
assurance that the presence of the United States
in the League of Nations would have prevented
Japanese and then Ciermaii threats to world peace
in the 1930s.

Beer represented the convictions and preju¬
dices of many of his contemporaries about the
progress of civilization. He had, as his friend Lord
Milner said of him, "a strong sense of the dtit\'
which the more advanced nations owe to the
more backward." Yet he saw no moral dilemma
between the "duly" of the advanced nations and
the aspirations of those whom they governed. A
man of immense goodwill and generosity,
although never naive, Beer could only hope, as he
would say, that "in the fullness of time" die United
 

States, now the greatest of the English-speaking
nations, would exercise the role it was destined to
play in fixing a broken world.

^ Beer refers to H.W.V. Temperley, distingiiished British
historian, decorated war veteran, and member of the
British delegation to the Paris Peace Conference. By
1924, Temperley had edited a six-volume History of the
Peace Conference of Paris.

^ Beer lists a group of people who were involved in
either the preparation of U.S. proposals for the Peace
Conference or the negotiation and drafting of the
Treaty itself. Colonel Edward M. House, President
Wilson's confidant and personal ambassador, was the
leader of the group. Gordon Auchincloss, House's son-
in4aw, served as assistant to the counseloi" in the State
Department. Da\id Hunter Miller, a New York lawyer
and partner of Auchincloss, seized as legal ad\isor to
House and had drafted many of the prorisions of the
Treat}'. Frank Wanin, also a New York lawyer, was Miller's
assistant. Ra>'mond Fosdick, a lawyer and diplomat, had
represented the U.S. War Department in France before
his appointment as first under-secretaiy general of the
League of Nations in 1919. Fosdick resigned this posi¬
tion early in 1920, when it became clear that the United
Slates would not join the League.
 

c^ 37 =^