It is of the essence of statesmanship to be able to put oneself in the place—­one might almost say in the skin—­of the foreign peoples and governments with which one is called upon to deal.  But the feat is arduous and presupposes a variety of conditions which the President was unable to fulfil.  His conception of Europe, for example, was much too simple.  It has been aptly likened to that of the American economist who once remarked to the manager of an English railway:  “You Britishers are handicapped by having to build your railway lines through cities and towns.  We go to work diligently:  we first construct the road and create the cities afterward.”

And Mr. Wilson happened just then to be in quest of a fulcrum on which to rest his idealistic lever.  For he had already been driven by egotistic governments from several of his commanding positions, and people were gibingly asking whether the new political gospel was being preached only as a foil for backslidings.  Thus he abandoned the freedom of the seas ... on which he had taken a determined stand before the world.  Although he refused the Rhine frontier to France, he had reluctantly given way to M. Clemenceau in the matter of the Saar Valley, assenting to a monstrous arrangement by which the German inhabitants of that region were to be handed over to the French Republic against their expressed will, as a set-off for a sum in gold which Germany would certainly be unable to pay.[194] He doubtless foresaw that he would also yield on the momentous issue of Shantung and the Chino-Japanese secret treaty.  In a word, some of his more important abstract tenets professed in words were being brushed aside when it came to acts, and his position was truly unenviable.  Naturally, therefore, he seized the first favorable occasion to apply them vigorously and unswervingly.  This was supplied by the dispute between Italy and Jugoslavia, two nations which he held, so to say, in the hollow of his hand.

The latter state, still in the making, depended for its frontiers entirely on the fiat of the American President backed by the Premiers of Britain and France.  And of this backing Mr. Wilson was assured.  Italy, although more powerful militarily than Jugoslavia, was likewise economically dependent upon the good-will of the two English-speaking communities, who were assured in advance of the support of the French Republic.  If, therefore, she could not be reasoned or cajoled into obeying the injunctions of the Supreme Council, she could easily be made malleable by other means.  In her case, therefore, Mr. Wilson’s ethical notions might be fearlessly applied.  That this was the idea which underlay the President’s policy is the obvious inference from the calm, unyielding way in which he treated the Italian delegation.  In this connection it should be borne in mind that there is no more important distinction between all former peace settlements and that of the Paris Conference than the unavowed but indubitable fact that the latter