Great Britain is part of Europe but is not on the Continent of Europe.  While Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Russia, Hungary, Holland, Belgium, etc., live the same life, are one in thought, Great Britain lives in her superb insularity.  If she had any moment of supreme anxiety during the War, it was in the spring and summer of 1917 during the terrible threat of the destruction of her shipping by submarines and the inability of construction to keep pace with it.  But after the defeat of Germany Great Britain found herself with a fleet far superior to those of all the rest of Europe put together; once more she broke away from Continental Europe.

Lloyd George, with swiftly acting brain and clear insight, undoubtedly the most remarkable man at the Paris Conference, found himself in a difficult situation between President Wilson’s pronouncements, some of them, like that regarding the freedom of the seas, undefined and dangerous, and the claims of France tending, after the brutal attack it had had to meet, not towards a true peace and the reconstruction of Europe, but towards the vivisection of Germany.  In one of the first moments, just before the General Elections, Lloyd George, too, promised measures of the greatest severity, the trial of the Kaiser, the punishment of all guilty of atrocities, compensation for all who had suffered from the War, the widest and most complete indemnity.  But such pronouncements gave way before his clear realization of facts, and later on he tried in vain to put the Conference on the plane of such realization.

Italy, as M. Tardieu says very plainly, carried no weight in the Conference.  In the meetings of the Prime Ministers and President Wilson le ton etait celui de la conversation; nul apparat, nulle pose.  M. Orlando parlait peu; l’activite de l’Italie a la conference a ete, jusqu’a l’exces, absorbee par la question de Fiume, et sa part dans les debats a ete de ce fait trop reduite.  Restait un dialogue a trois:  Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George.  The Italian Government came into the War in May, 1915, on the basis of the London Agreement of the preceding April, and it had never thought of claiming Fiume either before the War when it was free to lay down conditions or during the progress of the War.

The Italian people had always been kept in ignorance of the principles established in the London Agreement.  One of the men chiefly responsible for the American policy openly complained to me that when the United States came into the War no notification was given them of the London Agreement in which were defined the future conditions of part of Europe.  A far worse mistake was made in the failure to communicate the London Agreement to Serbia, which would certainly have accepted it without hesitation in the terrible position in which it then was.