and the source of others still more grievous.  True, in his own particular sphere each of them had achieved what is nowadays termed greatness.  As a war leader Mr. Lloyd George had been hastily classed with Marlborough and Chatham, M. Clemenceau compared to Danton, and Mr. Wilson set apart in a category to himself.  But without questioning these journalistic certificates of fame one must admit that all three plenipotentiaries were essentially politicians, old parliamentary hands, and therefore expedient-mongers whose highest qualifications for their own profession were drawbacks which unfitted them for their self-assumed mission.  Of the concrete world which they set about reforming their knowledge was amazingly vague.  “Frogs in the pond,” says the Japanese proverb, “know naught of the ocean.”  There was, of course, nothing blameworthy in their unacquaintanceship with the issues, but only in the offhandedness with which they belittled its consequences.  Had they been conversant with the subject or gifted with deeper insight, many of the things which seemed particularly clear to them would have struck them as sheer inexplicable, and among these perhaps their own leadership of the world-parliament.

What they lacked, however, might in some perceptible degree have been supplied by enlisting as their helpers men more happily endowed than themselves.  But they deliberately chose mediocrities.  It is a mark of genial spirits that they are well served, but the plenipotentiaries of the Conference were not characterized by it.  Away in the background some of them had familiars or casual prompters to whose counsels they were wont to listen, but many of the adjoints who moved in the limelight of the world-stage were gritless and pithless.

As the heads of the principal governments implicitly claimed to be the authorized spokesmen of the human race and endowed with unlimited powers, it is worth noting that this claim was boldly challenged by the peoples’ organs in the press.  Nearly all the journals read by the masses objected from the first to the dictatorship of the group of Premiers, Mr. Wilson being excepted.  “The modern parasite,” wrote a respectable democratic newspaper,[59] “is the politician.  Of all the privileged beings who have ever governed us he is the worst.  In that, however, there is nothing surprising ... he is not only amoral, but incompetent by definition.  And it is this empty-headed individual who is intrusted with the task of settling problems with the very rudiments of which he is unacquainted.”  Another French journal[60] wrote:  “In truth it is a misfortune that the leaders of the Conference are Cabinet chiefs, for each of them is obsessed by the carking cares of his domestic policy.  Besides, the Paris Conference takes on the likeness of a lyrical drama in which there are only tenors.  Now would even the most beautiful work in the world survive this excess of beauties?”