asked for independence found a ready hearing at the Supreme Council.  And some of them before they had lodged any such claim were encouraged to lose no time in asking for separation.  In one case a large sum of money and a mission were sent to “create the independent state of the Ukraine,” so impatient were peoples in the West to obtain a substitute for the Russian ally whom they had lost in the East, and great was their consternation when their proteges misspent the funds and made common cause with the Teutons.

Disorganized Russia was in some ways a godsend to the world’s administrators in Paris.  To the advocate of alliances, territorial equilibrium, and the old order of things it offered a facile means of acquiring new helpmates in the East by emancipating its various peoples in the name of right and justice.  It held out to the capitalists who deplored the loss of their milliards a potential source whence part of that loss might be made good.[128] To the zealots of the League of Nations it offered an unresisting body on which all the requisite operations from amputation to trepanning might be performed without the use of anesthetics.

The various border states of Russia were thus quietly lopped off without even the foreknowledge, much less the assent, of the patient, and without any pretense at plebiscites.  Finland, Esthonia, Latvia, Georgia were severed from the chaotic Slav state offhandedly, and the warrant was the doctrine propounded by President Wilson—­that every people shall be free to choose its own mode of living and working.  Every people?  Surely not, remarked unbiased onlookers.  The Egyptians, the Irish, the Austrians, the Persians, to name but four among many, are disqualified for the exercise of these indefeasible rights.  Perhaps with good reason?  Then modify the doctrine.  Why this difference of treatment? they queried.  Is it not because the supreme judge knows full well that Great Britain would not brook the discussion of the Egyptian or the Irish problem, and that France, in order to feel quite secure, must hinder the Austrian-Germans from coalescing with their brethren of the Reich?  But if Britain and France have the right to veto every self-denying measure that smacks of disruption or may involve a sacrifice, why is Russia bereft of it?  If the principle involved be of any value at all, its application must be universal.  To an equal all-round distribution of sacrifice the only alternative is the supremacy of force in the service of arbitrary rule.  And to this force, accordingly, the Supreme Council had recourse.  The only cases in which it seriously vindicated the rights of oppressed or dissatisfied peoples to self-determination against the will of the ruling race or nation were those in which that race or nation was powerless to resist.  Whenever Britain or France’s interests were deemed to be imperiled by the putting in force of any of the Fourteen Points, Mr. Wilson desisted from its application.  Thus it came about that Russia was