One statesman in Paris, who enjoys a world-wide reputation, dissented from those who sided with the lesser states.  He looked at their protests and tactics from an angle of vision which the unbiased historian, however emphatically he may dissent from it, cannot ignore.  He said:  “All the smaller communities are greedy and insatiable.  If the chiefs of the World Powers had understood their temper and ascertained their aspirations in 1914, much that has passed into history since then would never have taken place.  During the war these miniature countries were courted, flattered, and promised the sun and the moon, earth and heaven, and all the glories therein.  And now that these promises cannot be redeemed, they are wroth, and peevishly threaten the great states with disobedience and revolt.  This, it is true, they could not do if the latter had not forfeited their authority and prestige by allowing their internal differences, hesitations, contradictions, and repentances to become manifest to all.  To-day it is common knowledge that the Great Powers are amenable to very primitive incentives and deterrents.  If in the beginning they had been united and said to their minor brethren:  ‘These are your frontiers.  These your obligations,’ the minor brethren would have bowed and acquiesced gratefully.  In this way the boundary problems might have been settled to the satisfaction of all, for each new or enlarged state would have been treated as the recipient of a free gift from the World Powers.  But the plenipotentiaries went about their task in a different and unpractical fashion.  They began by recognizing the new communities, and then they gave them representatives at the Conference.  This they did on the ground that the League of Nations must first be founded, and that all well-behaved belligerents on the Allied side have a right to be consulted upon that.  And, finally, instead of keeping to their program and liquidating the war, they mingled the issues of peace with the clauses of the League and debated them simultaneously.  In these debates they revealed their own internal differences, their hesitancy, and the weakness of their will.  And the lesser states have taken advantage of that.  The general results have been the postponement of peace, the physical exhaustion of the Central Empires, and the spread of Bolshevism.”

It should not be forgotten that this mixture of the general and the particular of the old order and the new was objected to on other grounds.  The Italians, for example, urged that it changed the status of a large number of their adversaries into that of highly privileged Allies.  During the war they were enemies, before the peace discussions opened they had obtained forgiveness, after which they entered the Conference as cherished friends.  The Italians had waged their war heroically against the Austrians, who inflicted heavy losses on them.  Who were these Austrians?  They were composed of the various nationalities which