them in the general interest.  By acting in this manner, France, do what she may, is placing herself in opposition to the world’s interests, and to those of the League of Nations.  In the long run it is a serious business.  Spain, Portugal, and Holland know this to their cost.  Do what she would, France was not able before the war to utilize all her immense colonial domain ... for lack of population.  She will be still less able after the war...."[311]

The discussion grew dangerously animated.  Epigrams were coined and sent floating in the heavily charged air.  A tactless comparison was made between the French nation and a bon vivant of sixty-five who flatters himself that he can enjoy life’s pleasures on the same scale as when he was only thirty.  Little arrows thus barbed with biting acid often make more enduring mischief than sledge-hammer blows.  Soon the estrangement between the two sister nations unhappily became wider and led to marked divergences in their respective policies, which seem fraught with grave consequences in the future.

The Italy of to-day is not the Italy of May, 1915.  She now knows exactly where she stands.  When she unsheathed her sword to fight against the allies of the state that declared a treaty to be but a scrap of paper, she was heartened by a solemn promise given in writing by her comrades in arms.  But when she had accomplished her part of the contract, that document turned out to be little more than another scrap of paper.  Thus it was one of the piquant ironies of Fate, Italian publicists said, that the people who had mostly clamored against that doctrine were indirectly helping it to triumph.  Mr. Wilson, unwittingly sapping public faith in written treaties, was held up as one of the many pictures in which the Conference abounded of the delegates refuting their words by acts.  The unbiased historian will readily admit that the secret treaties were profoundly immoral from the Wilsonian angle of vision, but that the only way of canceling them was by a general principle rigidly upheld and impartially applied.  And this the Supreme Council would not entertain.

With her British ally, too, France had an unpleasant falling out about Eastern affairs, and in especial about Syria and Persia.  There was also a demand for the retrocession by Britain of the island of Mauritius, but it was not made officially, nor is it a subject for two such nations to quarrel over.  The first rift in the lute was caused by the deposition of Emir Faisal respecting the desires of the Arab population.  This picturesque chief, the French press complained, had been too readily admitted to the Conference and too respectfully listened to there, whereas the Persian delegation tramped for months over the Paris streets without once obtaining a hearing.  The Hedjaz, which had been independent from time immemorial, was formally recognized as a separate kingdom during the war, and the Grand Sheriff of Mecca was suddenly raised