The delegates picked up a good deal of miscellaneous information about the various countries whose future they were regulating, and to their credit it should be said that they put questions to their informants without a trace of false pride.  One of the two chief delegates wending homeward from a sitting at which M. Jules Cambon had spoken a good deal about those Polish districts which, although they contained a majority of Germans, yet belonged of right to Poland, asked the French delegate why he had made so many allusions to Frederick the Great.  “What had Frederick to do with Poland?” he inquired.  The answer was that the present German majority of the inhabitants was made up of colonists who had immigrated into the districts since the time of Frederick the Great and the partition of Poland.  “Yes, I see,” exclaimed the statesman, “but what had Frederick the Great to do with the partition of Poland?” ...  In the domain of ethnography there were also many pitfalls and accidents.  During an official expose of the Oriental situation before the Supreme Council, one of the Great Four, listening to a narrative of Turkish misdeeds, heard that the Kurds had tortured and killed a number of defenseless women, children, and old men.  He at once interrupted the speaker with the query:  “You now call them Kurds.  A few minutes ago you said they were Turks.  I take it that the Kurds and the Turks are the same people?” Loath to embarrass one of the world’s arbiters, the delegate respectfully replied, “Yes, sir, they are about the same, but the worse of the two are the Kurds."[63]

Great Britain’s first delegate, with engaging candor sought to disarm criticism by frankly confessing in the House of Commons that he had never before heard of Teschen, about which such an extraordinary fuss was then being made, and by asking:  “How many members of the House have ever heard of Teschen?  Yet,” he added significantly, “Teschen very nearly produced an angry conflict between two allied states."[64]

The circumstance that an eminent parliamentarian had never heard of problems that agitate continental peoples is excusable.  Less so was his resolve, despite such a capital disqualification, to undertake the task of solving those problems single-handed, although conscious that the fate of whole peoples depended on his succeeding.  It is no adequate justification to say that he could always fall back upon special commissions, of which there was no lack at the Conference.  Unless he possessed a safe criterion by which to assess the value of the commissions’ conclusions, he must needs himself decide the matter arbitrarily.  And the delegates, having no such criterion, pronounced very arbitrary judgments on momentous issues.  One instance of this turned upon Poland’s claims to certain territories incorporated in Germany, which were referred to a special commission under the presidency of M. Cambon.  Commissioners were sent to the country to study the matter on the spot, where they had received