They displayed their contempt for professional diplomacy and this feeling was shared by many, but they extended that sentiment to certain diplomatic postulates which can in no case be dispensed with, because they are common to all professions.  One of them is knowledge of the terms of the problems to be solved.  No conjuncture could have been less favorable for an experiment based on this theory.  The general situation made a demand on the delegates for special knowledge and experience, whereas the Premiers and the President, although specialists in nothing, had to act as specialists in everything.  Traditional diplomacy would have shown some respect for the law of causality.  It would have sent to the Conference diplomatists more or less acquainted with the issues to be mooted and also with the mentality of the other negotiators, and it would have assigned to them a number of experts as advisers.  It would have formed a plan similar to that proposed by the French authorities and rejected by the Anglo-Saxons.  In this way at least the technical part of the task would have been tackled on right lines, the war would have been liquidated and normal relations quickly re-established among the belligerent states.  It may be objected that this would have been a meager contribution to the new politico-social fabric.  Undoubtedly it would, but, however meager, it would have been a positive gain.  Possibly the first stone of a new world might have been laid once the ruins of the old were cleared away.  But even this modest feat could not be achieved by amateurs working in desultory fashion and handicapped by their political parties at home.  The resultant of their apparent co-operation was a sum in subtraction because dispersal or effort was unavoidably substituted for concentration.

Whether one contemplates them in the light of their public acts or through the prism of gossip, the figures cut by the delegates of the Great Powers were pathetic.  Giants in the parliamentary sphere, they shrank to the dimensions of dwarfs in the international.  In matters of geography, ethnography, history, and international politics they were helplessly at sea, and the stories told of certain of their efforts to keep their heads above water while maintaining a simulacrum of dignity would have been amusing were the issues less momentous.  “Is it after Upper or Lower Silesia that those greedy Poles are hankering?” one Premier is credibly reported to have asked some months after the Polish delegation had propounded and defended its claims and he had had time to familiarize himself with them.  “Please point out to me Dalmatia on the map,” was another characteristic request, “and tell me what connection there is between it and Fiume.”  One of the principal plenipotentiaries addressed a delegate who is an acquaintance of mine approximately as follows:  “I cannot understand the spokesmen of the smaller states.  To me they seem stark mad.  They single out a strip of territory and for no intelligible reason