The truth as revealed by subsequent facts would seem to be that each of the plenipotentiaries recognizing parliamentary success as the source of his power was obsessed by his own political problems and stimulated by his own immediate ends.  As these ends, however incompatible with each other, were believed by each one to tend toward the general object, he worked zealously for their attainment.  The consequences are notorious.  M. Clemenceau made France the hub of the universe.  Mr. Lloyd George harbored schemes which naturally identified the welfare of mankind with the hegemony of the English-speaking races.  Signor Orlando was inspired by the “sacred egotism” which had actuated all Italian Cabinets since Italy entered the war, and President Wilson was burning to associate his name and also that of his country with the vastest and noblest enterprise inscribed in the annals of history.  And each one moved over his own favorite route toward his own goal.  It was an apt illustration of the Russian fable of the swan, the crab, and the pike being harnessed together in order to remove a load.  The swan flew upward, the crab crawled backward, the pike made with all haste for the water, and the load remained where it was.

A lesser but also a serious disadvantage of the delegation of government chiefs made itself felt in the procedure.  Embarrassing delays were occasioned by the unavoidable absences of the principal delegates whom pressure of domestic politics called to their respective capitals, as well as by their tactics, and their colleagues profited by their absence for the sake of the good cause.  Thus all Paris, as we saw, was aware that the European chiefs, whose faith in Wilsonian orthodoxy was still feeble at that time, were prepared to take advantage of the President’s sojourn in Washington to speed up business in their own sense and to confront him on his return with accomplished facts.  But when, on his return, he beheld their handiwork he scrapped it, and a considerable loss of time ensued for which the world has since had to pay very heavily.

Again, when Premier Orlando was in Rome after Mr. Wilson’s appeal to the Italian people, a series of measures was passed by the delegates in Paris affecting Italy, diminishing her importance at the Conference, and modifying the accepted interpretation of the Treaty of London.  Some of these decisions had to be canceled when the Italians returned.  These stratagems had an undesirable effect on the Italians.

Not the least of the Premiers’ disabilities lay in the circumstance that they were the merest novices in international affairs.  Geography, ethnography, psychology, and political history were sealed books to them.  Like the rector of Louvain University who told Oliver Goldsmith that, as he had become the head of that institution without knowing Greek, he failed to see why it should be taught there, the chiefs of state, having attained the highest position in their respective countries without more than an inkling of international affairs, were unable to realize the importance of mastering them or the impossibility of repairing the omission as they went along.