The delegates who aimed at disarmament and a society of pacific peoples made out as good a case—­once their premises were admitted—­as those who insisted upon guarantees, economic and territorial.  Everything depended, for the theory adopted, upon each individual’s breadth of view, and for its realization upon the temper of the peoples and that of their neighbors.  As under the given circumstances either solution was sure to encounter formidable opposition, which only a doughty spirit would dare to affront, compromise, offering a side-exit out of the quandary, was avidly taken.  In this way the collective sagacities, working in materials the nature of which they hardly understood, brought forth strange products.  Some of the incongruities of the details, such, for instance, as the invitation to Prinkipo, despatched anonymously, occasionally surpass satire, but their bewildered authors are entitled to the benefit of extenuating circumstances.

On the momentous issue of a permanent peace based on Mr. Wilson’s pristine concept of a league of nations, and in accordance with rigid principles applied equally to all the states, there was no discussion.  In other words, it was tacitly agreed that the fourteen points should not form a bar to the vital postulates of any of the Great Powers.  It was only on the subject of the lesser states and the equality of nations that the debates were intense, protracted, and for a long while fruitless.  At times words flamed perilously high.  For months the solutions of the Adriatic, the Austrian, Turkish, and Thracian problems hung in poignant suspense, the public looking on with diminishing interest and waxing dissatisfaction.  The usual optimistic assurances that all would soon run smoothly and swiftly fell upon deaf ears.  Faith in the Conference was melting away.

The plight of the Supreme Council and the vain exhortations to believe in its efficiency reminded me of the following story.

A French parish priest was once spiritually comforting a member of his flock who was tormented by doubts about the goodness of God as measured by the imperfection of His creation.  Having listened to a vivid account of the troubled soul’s high expectation of its Maker and of its deep disappointment at His work, the pious old cure said:  “Yes, my child.  The world is indeed bad, as you say, and you are right to deplore it.  But don’t you think you may have formed to yourself an exaggerated idea of God?” An analogous reflection would not be out of place when passing judgment on the Conference which implicitly arrogated to itself some of the highest attributes of the Deity, and thus heightened the contrast between promise and achievement.  Certainly people expected much more from it than it could possibly give.  But it was the delegates themselves who had aroused these expectations announcing the coming of a new epoch at their fiat.  The peoples were publicly told by Mr. Lloyd George and several of his colleagues that the war of 1914-18 would be the last.  His “Never again” became a winged phrase, and the more buoyant optimists expected to see over the palace of arbitration which was to be substituted for the battlefield, the inspiring inscription:  “A la derniere des guerres, l’humanite reconnaissante."[46] Mr. Wilson’s vast project was still more attractive.