To this dwarfing parliamentary view of world-policy Mr. Lloyd George likewise fell a victim.  But his fault was not so glaring.  For it should in fairness be remembered that it was not he who first preached the advent of the millennium.  He had only given it a tardy and cold assent, qualified by an occasional sally of keen pleasantry.  Down to the last moment, as we saw, he not only was unaware that the Covenant would be inserted in the Peace Treaty, but he was strongly of the opinion, as indeed were M. Pichon and others, that the two instruments were incompatible.  He also apparently inclined to the belief that spiritual and moral agencies, if not wholly impotent to bring about the requisite changes in the politico-social world, could not effect the transformation for a long while to come, and that in the interval it behooved the governments to fall back upon the old system of so-called equilibrium, which, after Germany’s collapse, meant an informal kind of Anglo-Saxon overlordship of the world and a pax Britannica in Europe.  As for his action at the Conference, in so far as it did not directly affect the well-being of the British Empire, which was his first and main care, one might describe it as one of general agreement with Mr. Wilson.  He actually threw it into that formula when he said that whenever the interests of the British Empire permitted he would like to find himself at one with the United States.  It was on that occasion that the person addressed warned him against identifying the President with the people of the United States.

In truth, it was difficult to follow the distinguished American idealist, because one seldom knew whither he would lead.  Neither, apparently, did he himself.  Some of his own countrymen in Paris held that he had always been accustomed to follow, never to guide.  Certainly at the Conference his practice was to meet the more powerful of his contradictors on their own ground and come to terms with them, so as to get at least a part of what he aimed at, and that he accepted, even when the instalment was accorded to him not as such, but as a final settlement.  So far as one can judge by his public acts and by the admissions of State-Secretary Lansing, he cannot have seriously contemplated staking the success of his mission on the realization of his Fourteen Points.  The manner in which he dealt with his Covenant, with the French demand for concrete military guaranties and with secret treaties, all afford striking illustrations of his easy temper.  Before quitting Paris for Washington he had maintained that the Covenant as drafted was satisfactory, nay, he contended that “not even a period could be changed in the agreement.”  The Monroe Doctrine, he held, needed no special stipulation.  But as soon as Senator Lodge and others took issue with him on the subject, he shifted his position and hedged that doctrine round with defenses which cut off a whole continent from the purview of the League,