Every effort, then, should now be made to follow the opposite road to that traversed up to now, the more so in that the treaties cannot be carried out; and if it is desired that the conquered countries shall pay compensation to the conquerors, at least in part, for the most serious damage, then the line to be followed must be based on realities instead of on violence.

But before trying to see how and why the treaties cannot be carried out, it may be well to consider how the actual system of treaties has been reached, in complete opposition to all that was said by the Entente during the War and to President Wilson’s fourteen points.  At the same time ought to be examined the causes which led in six months from the declarations of the Entente and of President Wilson to the Treaty of Versailles.

The most important cause for what has happened was the choice of Paris as the meeting-place of the Conference.  After the War Paris was the least fitted of any place for the holding of a Peace Conference, and in the two French leaders, the President of the Republic, Poincare, and the President of the Council of Ministers, Clemenceau, even if the latter was more adaptable in mind and more open to consideration of arguments on the other side, were two temperaments driving inevitably to extremes.  Victory had come in a way that surpassed all expectation; a people that, living through every day the War had lasted, had passed through every sorrow, privation, agony, had now but one thought, to destroy the enemy.  The atmosphere of Paris was fiery.  The decision of the peace terms to be imposed on the enemy was to be taken in a city which a few months before, one might really say a few weeks before, had been under the fire of the long-range guns invented by the Germans, in hourly dread of enemy aeroplanes.  Even now it is inexplicable that President Wilson did not realize the situation which must inevitably come about.  It is possible that the delirium of enthusiasm with which he was received at Paris may have given him the idea that it was in him alone that the people trusted, may have made him take the welcome given to the representative of the deciding factor of the War as the welcome to the principles which he had proclaimed to the world.  Months later, when he left France amid general indifference if not distrust, President Wilson must have realized that he had lost, not popularity, but prestige, the one sure element of success for the head of a Government, much more so for the head of a State.  It was inevitable that a Peace Conference held in Paris, only a few months after the War, with the direction and preparation of the work almost entirely in French hands and with Clemenceau at the head of everything, should conclude as it did conclude; all the more so when Italy held apart right from the beginning, and England, though convinced of the mistakes being made, could not act freely and effectively.

The first duty of the Peace Conference was to restore a state of equilibrium and re-establish conditions of life.  Taking Europe as an economic unity, broken by the War, it was necessary first of all and in the interests of all to re-establish conditions of life which would make it possible for the crisis to be overcome with the least possible damage.