The Covenant of the League of Nations formed Part I of each of the treaties of peace concluded after the first world war, and, when the first of these, the Treaty of Versailles, entered into force on 10 January 1920, the League began to exist. The incorporation of the Covenant in the treaties was a point on which President Wilson had strongly insisted at the peace conference; he looked to the League as a means whereby injustices and imperfections in the treaties would at some future time be corrected, and he probably foresaw that if the making of the League were postponed until after the treaties came into force there would almost certainly be no League at all. For the League this course had both disadvantages and advantages. On the one hand it led to the League's sharing in the unpopularity which assailed the peace treaties, for it could be represented by hostile or ignorant critics as merely an instrument which the victors had devised in order to rivet on the vanquished the injustices of the settlement. On the other hand the treaties had many provisions to which effect could only be given by a continuing organisation such as the League was intended to be, and by using the League for this purpose they ensured that it would at once be called on to play a part in great affairs and not be relegated to the obscurity to which, as Wilson had reason to suspect, some of his colleagues would have liked to consign it.