"President Wilson is an able man who is seeking to save the bourgeoisie, but he must not be followed," exclaimed M. Loriot at a meeting of French Socialists in Paris. "The moment has come to choose between him and Lenine."

The issue could not be more clearly or more felicitously expressed. It is an issue that does not confront the French Socialists alone. It confronts all Europe. It confronts the whole civilized world. From the moment the armistice was signed it became the dominant political question for the Peace Conference to answer. The irrepressible conflict of peace is between democracy and--Bolshevism. Is Wilson to triumph, or Lenine?

This political situation has been increasingly clear to European statesmen for many weeks. They are closer to the heart of things than most Americans, and it has long been plain to them that the world was not going back to the old conditions that prevailed before the war. Many of them have no personal sympathy with this new state of affairs or liking for the inexorable facts of the case. They would much prefer to have the world drop comfortably back into the ancient order of things and be satisfied to let well enough alone, but they realize that it cannot be, and they are not such fools as to believe that the tide of events can be swept back.

The triumphs that President Wilson has won at the Paris Conference are due wholly to the appeal that his program has made to the imagination of the great mass of the people of Europe. Statesmen are following him not because they like him personally but because their people are following him and because they know that if they reject the Wilson program they have nothing to substitute for it that can satisfy public sentiment. It is their one bulwark against the Anarchistic flood.

It is only the more hopeless reactionary element of the Bourbons and Tories who regard the President's peace proposals as a sort of half-way house to Bolshevism. Having more brains than the Bourbons and Tories, the real Bolsheviki have perceived from the outset that their real enemy was Wilsonism. That is why they unhesitatingly chose German autocracy as an ally and why they have resisted the President's program as bitterly as Junkertum itself.

There is no common ground between the Wilson theories of government and the Lenine theories, between the Wilson kind of peace and the Lenine kind of peace. There can be no compromise between them, and soon or late even the Bourbons will have to make the choice that M. Loriot presented to the French Socialists. They will have to take Wilson or Lenine, because it so happens that Wilson and Lenine embody the great issue that civilization must meet and determine. NEW YORK WORLD