* * * * *

Casting a final glance at the results of the Conference, it would be ungracious not to welcome as a precious boon the destruction of Prussian militarism, a consummation which we owe to the heroism of the armies rather than to the sagacity of the lawgivers in Paris.  The restoration of a Polish state and the creation or extension of the other free communities at the expense of the Central Empires are also most welcome changes, which, however, ought never to have been marred by the disruptive wedge of the minority legislation.  Again, although the League is a mill whose sails uselessly revolve, because it has no corn to grind, the mere fact that the necessity of internationalism was solemnly proclaimed as the central idea of the new ordering, and that an effort, however feeble, was put forth to realize it in the shape of a covenant of social and moral fellowship, marks an advance from which there can be no retrogression.

Actuality was thereby imparted to the idea, which is destined to remain in the forefront of contemporary politics until the peoples themselves embody it in viable institutions.  What the delegates failed to realize is the truth that a program of a league is not a league.

On the debit side much might be added to what has already been said.  The important fact to bear in mind—­which in itself calls for neither praise nor blame—­is that the world-parliament was at bottom an Anglo-Saxon assembly whose language, political conceptions, self-esteem, and disregard of everything foreign were essentially English.  When speaking, the faces of the principal delegates were turned toward the future, and when acting they looked toward the past.  As a thoroughly English press organ, when alluding to the League of Nations, puts it:  “We have done homage to that entrancing ideal by spatchcocking the Convention into the Treaty.  There it remains as a finger-post to point the way to a new heaven on earth.  But we observe that the Treaty itself is a good old eighteenth-century piece, drawing its inspiration from mundane and practical considerations, and paying a good deal more than lip service to the principle of the balance of power."[372]

That is a fair estimate of the work achieved by the delegates.  But they sinned in their way of doing it.  If they had deliberately and professedly aimed at these results, and had led the world to look for none other, most of the criticisms to which they have rendered themselves open would be pointless.  But they raised hopes which they refused to realize, they weakened if they did not destroy faith in public treaties, they intensified distrust and race hatred throughout the world, they poured strong dissolvents upon every state on the European Continent, and they stirred up fierce passions in Russia, and then left that ill-starred nation a prey to unprecedented anarchy.  In a word, they gathered up all the widely scattered explosives of imperialism, nationalism, and internationalism, and, having added to their destructiveness, passed them on to the peoples of the world as represented by the League of Nations.  Some of them deplored the mess in which they were leaving the nations, without, however, admitting the causal nexus between it and their own achievements.