M. Clemenceau’s opening utterance about the twelve million men, and the unlimited right which such formidable armies confer on their possessors to sit in judgment on the tribes and peoples of the planet, was the true keynote to the Conference.  After that the leading statesmen trimmed their ship, touched the rudder, and sailed toward downright absolutism.

The effect of such utterances and acts on the minds of the peoples are distinctly mischievous.  For they tend to obliterate the sense of public right, which is the main foundation of international intercourse among progressive nations.

And already it had been shaken and weakened by the campaigns of the past fifty years, and in particular by the last war.  In the relations of nation to nation there were certain principles—­derivatives of ethics diluted with maxims of expediency—­which kept the various governments from too flagrant breaches of faith.  These checks were the only substitute for morality in politics.  Their highest power was connoted by the word Europeanism, which stood for a supposed feeling of solidarity among all the peoples of the old Continent, and for a certain respect for the treaties on which the state-system reposed.  But it existed mainly among defeated nations when apprehensive of being isolated or chastised by their victors.  None the less, the idea marked a certain advance toward an ethical bond of union.

Now this embryonic sense, together with respect for the binding force of a nation’s plighted troth, were numbered by the demoralizing influence of the wars of the last fifty years.  And one of the first and peremptory needs of the world was their restoration.  This could be effected only by bringing the peoples, not merely of Europe, but of the world, more closely together, by engrafting on them a feeling of close solidarity, and impressing them with the necessity of making common cause in the one struggle worth their while waging—­resistance to the forces that militate against human welfare and progress.  The feeling was widespread that the way to effect this was by some form of internationalism, by the broadening, deepening, and quickening all that was implied by Europeanism, by co-ordinating the collective energies of all progressive peoples, and causing them to converge toward a common and worthy goal.  For the working classes this conception in a restricted form had long possessed a commanding attraction.  What they aimed at, however, was no more than the catholicity of labor.  They fancied that after the passage of the tidal wave of destructiveness the ground was cleared of most of the obstacles which had encumbered it, and that the forward advance might begin forthwith.