in August, 1912, that in every war churches and monuments of art must suffer, and that “no army, whatever its nationality, can renounce this.”  He was further charged with having taken a kindly interest in air-war and bomb-dropping, and given it as his opinion that it would be absurd “to deprive of this advantage those who had made most progress in perfecting this weapon.”  But M. Tardieu successfully exorcised these and other ghosts.  And on his return from the United States he was charged with organizing a press bureau of his own, to supply American journalists with material for their cablegrams, while at the same time he collaborated with M. Clemenceau in reorganizing the political communities of the world.  It is only in the French Chamber, of which he is a distinguished member, that M. Tardieu failed to score a brilliant success.  Few men are prophets in their own country, and he is far from being an exception.  At the Conference, in its later phases, he found himself in frequent opposition to the chief of the Italian delegation, Signor Tittoni.  One of the many subjects on which they disagreed was the fate of German Austria and the political structure and orientation of the independent communities which arose on the ruins of the Dual Monarchy.  M. Tardieu favored an arrangement which would bring these populations closely together and impart to the whole an anti-Teutonic impress.  If Germany could not be broken up into a number of separate states, as in the days of her weakness, all the other European peoples in the territories concerned could, and should, be united against her, and at the least hindered from making common cause with her.  The unification of Germany he considered a grave danger, and he strove to create a countervailing state system.

To the execution of this project there were formidable difficulties.  For one thing, none of the peoples in question was distinctly anti-German.  Each one was for itself.  Again, they were not particularly enamoured of one another, nor were their interests always concordant, and to constrain them by force to unite would have been not to prevent but to cause future wars.  A Danubian federation—­the concrete shape imagined for this new bulwark of European peace—­did not commend itself to the Italians, who had their own reasons for their opposition besides the Wilsonian doctrine, which they invoked.  If it be true, Signor Tittoni argues, that Austria does not desire to be amalgamated with Germany, why not allow her to exercise the right of self-determination accorded to other peoples?  M. Tardieu, on the other hand, not content with the prohibition to Germany to unite with Austria, proposed[52] that in the treaty with Austria this country should be obliged to repress the unionist movement in the population.  This amendment was inveighed against by the Italian delegation in the name of every principle professed and transgressed by the world-mending Powers.  Even from the French point of view he declared it perilous, inasmuch as there was, and could be, no guarantee that a Danubian confederation would not become a tool in Germany’s hands.