This odd mixture of exaggerated self-confidence, mismeasurement of forces, and pliability to external influences could not but be baleful in one of the leaders of an assembly composed, as was the Paris Conference, of men each with his own particular ax to grind and impressible only to high moral authority or overwhelming military force.  It cannot be gainsaid that no one, not even his own familiars, could ever foresee the next move in Mr. Lloyd George’s game of statecraft, and it is demonstrable that on several occasions he himself was so little aware of what he would do next that he actually advocated as indispensable measures diametrically opposed to those which he was to propound, defend, and carry a week or two later.  A conversation which took place between him and one of his fellow-workers gives one the measure of his irresolution and fitfulness.  “Do tell me,” said this collaborator, “why it is that you members of the Supreme Council are hurriedly changing to-day the decisions you came to after five months’ study, which you say was time well spent?”

“Because of fresh information we have received in the meanwhile.  We know more now than we knew then and the different data necessitate different treatment.”

“Yes, but the conditions have not changed since the Conference opened.  Surely they were the same in January as they are in June.  Is not that so?”

“No doubt, no doubt, but we did not ascertain them before June, so we could not act upon them until now.”

With the leading delegates thus drifting and the pieces on the political chessboard bewilderingly disposed, outsiders came to look upon the Conference as a lottery.  Unhappily, it was a lottery in which there were no mere blanks, but only prizes or heavy forfeits.

To sum up:  the first British delegate, essentially a man of expedients and shifts, was incapable of measuring more than an arc of the political circle at a time.  A comprehensive survey of a complicated situation was beyond his reach.  He relied upon imagination and intuition as substitutes for precise knowledge and technical skill.  Hence he himself could never be sure that his decision, however carefully worked out, would be final, seeing that in June facts might come to his cognizance with which five months’ investigations had left him unacquainted.  This incertitude about the elements of the problem intensified the ingrained hesitancy that had characterized his entire public career and warped his judgment effectually.  The only approach to a guiding principle one can find in his work at the Conference was the loosely held maxim that Great Britain’s best policy was to stand in with the United States in all momentous issues and to identify Mr. Wilson with the United States for most purposes of the Congress.  Within these limits Mr. Lloyd George was unyielding in fidelity to the cause of France, with which he merged that of civilization.