The delegates of the lesser states, to whom one should not look for impartial judgments, formulated some queer theories to explain the Allies’ unavowed policy and revealed a frame of mind in no wise conducive to the attainment of the ostensible ends of the Conference.  One delegate said to me:  “I have no longer the faintest doubt that the firm purpose of the ‘Big Two’ is the establishment of the hegemony of the Anglo-Saxon peoples, which in the fullness of time may be transformed into the hegemony of the United States of North America.  Even France is in some respects their handmaid.  Already she is bound to them indissolubly.  She is admittedly unable to hold her own without their protection.  She will become more dependent on them as the years pass and Germany, having put her house in order, regains her economic preponderance on the Continent.  This decline is due to the operation of a natural law which diplomacy may retard but cannot hinder.  Numbers will count in the future, and then France’s role will be reduced.  For this reason it is her interest that her new allies in eastern Europe should be equipped with all the means of growing and keeping strong instead of being held in the leading-strings of the overlords.  But perhaps this tutelage is reckoned one of those means?”

Against Britain in especial the Poles, as we saw, were wroth.  They complained that whenever they advanced a claim they found her first delegate on their path barring their passage, and if Mr. Wilson chanced to be with them the British Premier set himself to convert him to his way of thinking or voting.  Thus it was against Mr. Lloyd George that the eastern Galician problem had had to be fought at every stage.  At the outset the British Premier refused Galicia to Poland categorically and purposed making it an entirely separate state under the League of Nations.  This design, of which he made no secret, inspired the insistence with which the armistice with the Ruthenians of Galicia was pressed.  The Polish delegates, one of them a man of incisive speech, left no stone unturned to thwart that part of the English scheme, and they finally succeeded.  But their opponents contrived to drop a spoonful of tar in Poland’s pot of honey by ordering a plebiscite to take place in eastern Galicia within ten or fifteen years.  Then came the question of the Galician Constitution.  The Poles proposed to confer on the Ruthenians a restricted measure of home rule with authority to arrange in their own way educational and religious matters, local communications, and the means of encouraging industry and agriculture, besides giving them a proportionate number of seats in the state legislature in Warsaw.  But again the British delegates—­experienced in problems of home rule—­expressed their dissatisfaction and insisted on a parliament or diet for the Ukraine invested with considerable authority over the affairs of the province.  The Poles next announced their intention to have a governor of eastern