It was at this conjuncture that a Rumanian friend remarked to me:  “The apprehension which our people expressed to you some months ago when they rejected the demand for concessions has been verified by events.  Please remember that when striking the balance of accounts.”

The fact could not be blinked that in the camp of the Allies there was a serious schism.  The partizans of the Supreme Council accused the Bucharest government of secession, and were accused in turn of having misled their Rumanian partners, of having planned to exploit them economically, of having favored their Bolshevist invaders, and pursued a policy of blackmail.  The rights and wrongs of this quarrel had best be left to another tribunal.  What can hardly be gainsaid is that in a general way the Rumanians—­and not these alone—­were implicitly classed as people of a secondary category, who stood to gain by every measure for their good which the culture-bearers in Paris might devise.  These inferior nations were all incarnate anachronisms, relics of dark ages which had survived into an epoch of democracy and liberty, and it now behooved them to readjust themselves to that.  Their institutions must be modernized, their Old World conceptions abandoned, and their people taught to imitate the progressive nations of the West.  What the populations thought and felt on the subject was irrelevant, they being less qualified to judge what was good for them than their self-constituted guides and guardians.  To the angry voices which their spokesmen uplifted no heed need be paid, and passive resistance could be overcome by coercion.  This modified version of Carlyle’s doctrine would seem to be at the root of the Supreme Council’s action toward the lesser nations generally and in especial toward Rumania.

POLAND AND THE SUPREME COUNCIL

This frequent misdirection by the Supreme Council, however one may explain it, created an electric state of the political atmosphere among all nations whose interests were set down or treated as “limited,” and more than one of them, as we saw, contemplated striking out a policy of passive resistance.  As a matter of fact some of them timidly adopted it more than once, almost always with success and invariably with impunity.  It was thus that the Czechoslovaks—­the most docile of them all—­disregarding the injunctions of the Conference, took possession of contentious territory,[178] and remained in possession of it for several months, and that the Jugoslavs occupied a part of the district of Klagenfurt and for a long time paid not the slightest heed to the order issued by the Supreme Council to evacuate it in favor of the Austrians, and that the Poles applied the same tactics to eastern Galicia.  The story of this last revolt is characteristic alike of the ignorance and of the weakness of the Powers which had assumed the functions of world-administrators.  During the hostilities