BENES, Edvard.

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Autograph manuscript signed, of his preface to a book on Woodrow Wilson and the peace settlement. Beneš's original handwritten preface to the Czech translation of Ray Stannard Baker's Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, praising Wilson and his vision of international order. Beneš was one of the principal architects of the independence of Czechoslovakia, the new state drawing much of its international legitimacy from Wilsonian principles of national self-determination.Baker had been Director of the Press Bureau of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace in 1919 and became Wilson's authorized biographer. Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement was first published in the US in 1922. The Czech translation was published in Prague in 1925 as Woodrow Wilson a úprava světa.Beneš was then Czechoslovakia's Minister of Foreign Affairs and had represented the new state at the Paris Peace Conference. He writes that, although Baker's account will require revision when the official documents are published, the book will "become one of the most important sources for the history of the World War and of the peace concluded after" (translated). It presents Wilson's principal aims as the creation of the League of Nations, disarmament, and the democratization of international politics, then traces how these principles were tested in practice. Beneš's praise is emphatic: "Wilson appears to us decidedly as a man of extraordinary greatness. Against one familiar world he stands as the representative

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