principal Powers were devoid of many of these qualities cannot fairly be made a subject of reproach.  It was merely an accident.  But it was as unfortunate as their honest conviction that they could accomplish the grandiose enterprise of remodeling the communities of the world without becoming conversant with their interests, acquainted with their needs, or even aware of their whereabouts.  For their failure, which was inevitable, was also bound to be tragic, inasmuch as it must involve, not merely their own ambition to live in history as the makers of a new and regenerate era, but also the destinies of the nations and races which confidently looked up to them for the conditions of future pacific progress, nay, of normal existence.

During the Conference it was the fashion in most European countries to question the motives as well as to belittle the qualifications of the delegates.  Now that political passion has somewhat abated and the atmosphere is becoming lighter and clearer, one may without provoking contradiction pay a well-deserved tribute to their sincerity, high purpose, and quick response to the calls of public duty and moral sentiment.  They were animated with the best intentions, not only for their respective countries, but for humanity as a whole.  One and all they burned with the desire to go as far as feasible toward ending the era of destructive wars.  Steady, uninterrupted, pacific development was their common ideal, and they were prepared to give up all that they reasonably could to achieve it.  It is my belief, for example, that if Mr. Wilson had persisted in making his League project the cornerstone of the new world structure and in applying his principles without favor, the Italians would have accepted it almost without discussion, and the other states would have followed their example.  All the delegates must have felt that the old order of things, having been shaken to pieces by the war and its concomitants, could not possibly survive, and they naturally desired to keep within evolutionary bounds the process of transition to the new system, thus accomplishing by policy what revolution would fain accomplish by violence.  It was only when they came to define that policy with a view to its application that their unanimity was broken up and they split into two camps, the pacifists and the militarists, or the democrats and imperialists, as they have been roughly labeled.  Here, too, each member of the assembly worked with commendable single-mindedness, and under a sense of high responsibility, for that solution of the problem which to him seemed the most conducive to the general weal.  And they wrestled heroically one with the other for what they held to be right and true relatively to the prevalent conditions.  The circumstance that the cause and effects of this clash of opinions and sentiments were so widely at variance with early anticipations had its roots partly in their limited survey of the complex problem, and partly, too, in its overwhelming vastness and their own unfitness to cope with it.