obtain for them complete autonomy.  To this demand M.B. is said to have received a reply[68] to the effect that the President “is persuaded that this question will form the subject of a thorough examination by the competent authorities of the Conference” Corsica, the birthplace of Napoleon, and as much an integral part of France as the Isle of Man is of England, seeking to slacken the ties that link it to the Republic and receiving a promise that the matter would be carefully considered by the delegates sounds more like a mystification than a sober statement of fact.  The story was sent to the newspapers for publication, but the censor very wisely struck it out.

These and kindred occurrences enable one better to appreciate the motives which prompted the delegates to shroud their conversations and tentative decisions in a decorous veil of secrecy.

It is but fair to say that the enterprise to which they set their hands was the vastest that ever tempted lofty ambitions since the tower-builders of Babel strove to bring heaven within reach of the earth.  It transcended the capacity of the contemporary world’s greatest men.[69] It was a labor for a wonder-worker in the pristine days of heroes.  But although to solve even the main problems without residue was beyond the reach of the most genial representatives of latter-day statecraft, it needed only clearness of conception, steadiness of purpose, and the proper adjustment of means to ends, to begin the work on the right lines and give it an impulse that might perhaps carry it to completion in the fullness of time.

But even these postulates were wanting.  The eminent parliamentarians failed to rise to the gentle height of average statecraft.  They appeared in their new and august character of world-reformers with all the roots still clinging to them of the rank electoral soil from which they sprang.  Their words alone were redolent of idealism, their deeds were too often marred by pettifogging compromises or childish blunders—­constructive phrases and destructive acts.  Not only had they no settled method of working, they lacked even a common proximate aim.  For although they all employed the same phraseology when describing the objects for which their countries had fought and they themselves were ostensibly laboring, no two delegates attached the same ideas to the words they used.  Yet, instead of candidly avowing this root-defect and remedying it, they were content to stretch the euphemistic terms until these covered conflicting conceptions and gratified the ears of every hearer.  Thus, “open covenants openly arrived at” came to mean arbitrary ukases issued by a secret conclave, and “the self-determination of peoples” connoted implicit obedience to dictatorial decrees.  The new result was a bewildering phantasmagoria.

And yet it was professedly for the purpose of obviating such misunderstandings that Mr. Wilson had crossed the Atlantic.  Having expressed in plain terms the ideals for which American soldiers had fought, and which became the substance of the thoughts and purposes of the associated statesmen, “I owe it to them,” he had said, “to see to it, in so far as in me lies, that no false or mistaken interpretation is put upon them and no possible effort omitted to realize them.”  And that was the result achieved.