country his influence on the delegates was decisive.  M. Clemenceau, who before the war was the intimate friend of Austrian journalists, hated his country’s enemies with undying hate.  And he loved France passionately.  I remember significant words of his, uttered at the end of the year 1899 to an enterprising young man who had founded a Franco-German review in Munich and craved his moral support.  “Is it possible,” he exclaimed, “that it has already come to that?  Well, a nation is not conquered until it accepts defeat.  Whenever France gives up she will have deserved her humiliation.”

At the Conference M. Clemenceau moved every lever to deliver his country for all time from the danger of further invasions.  And, being a realist, he counted only on military safeguards.  At the League of Nations he was wont to sneer until it dawned upon him that it might be forged into an effective weapon of national defense.  And then he included it in the litany of abstract phrases about right, justice, and the self-determination of peoples which it became the fashion to raise to the inaccessible heights where those ideals are throned which are to be worshiped but not incarnated.  The public somehow never took his conversion to Wilsonianism seriously, neither did his political friends until the League bade fair to become serviceable in his country’s hands.  M. Clemenceau’s acquaintanceship with international politics was at once superior to that of the British Premier and very slender.  But his program at the Conference was simple and coherent, because independent of geography and ethnography:  France was to take Germany’s leading position in the world, to create powerful and devoted states in eastern Europe, on whose co-operation she could reckon, and her allies were to do the needful in the way of providing due financial and economic assistance so as to enable her to address herself to the cultural problems associated with her new role.  And he left nothing undone that seemed conducive to the attainment of that object.  Against Mr. Wilson he maneuvered to the extent which his adviser, M. Tardieu, deemed safe, and one of his most daring speculations was on the President’s journey to the States, during which M. Clemenceau and his European colleagues hoped to get through a deal of work on their own lines and to present Mr. Wilson with the decisions ready for ratification on his return.  But the stratagem was not merely apparent; it was bruited abroad with indiscreet details, whereupon the first American delegate on his return broke the tables of their laws—­one of which separated the Treaty from the Covenant—­and obliged them to begin anew.  It is fair to add that M. Clemenceau was no uncompromising partisan of the conquest of the left bank of the Rhine, nor of colonial conquests.  These currents took their rise elsewhere.  “We don’t want protesting deputies in the French Parliament,” he once remarked in the presence of the French Minister of Foreign Affairs.[50] Offered the choice between a number of bridgeheads in Germany and the military protection of the Anglo-Saxon peoples, he unhesitatingly decided for the latter, which had been offered to him by President Wilson after the rejection of the Rhine frontier.