February 28, 1919

The Arabs had many friends at the Conference, but none more unswerving in allegiance to their just cause than this honest, gray-eyed, North Country English girl. In a sense, as is so often the case, her letter, if read without due attention to the circumstances existing at the time it was written, is misleading. She did not mean to say that the Arabs did not know what they wanted; they wanted an independent state and they did not want the French to stay in Syria. But as between a mandate by Britain, with her special imperial interests in the Near and Middle East, and that of far-away America, they were in doubt, and no one knew it better than Gertrude Bell. Britain had special interests which at any moment might seem vital, and if America received the mandate, she was so far away that she might forget all about her distant wards. Gertrude had studied the problem quite closely and, not entirely without reason, she was inclined to think that our legislators in Washington often forgot their responsibility for our wards in the Philippines.