No such juggling with words as went on at the Conference had been witnessed since the days of medieval casuistry.  New meanings were infused into old terms, rendering the help of “exegesis” indispensable.  Expressions like “territorial equilibrium” and “strategic frontiers” were stringently banished, and it is affirmed that President Wilson would wince and his expression change at the bare mention of these obnoxious symbols of the effete ordering which it was part of his mission to do away with forever.  And yet the things signified by those words were preserved withal under other names.  Nor could it well be otherwise.  One can hardly conceive a durable state system in Europe under the new any more than the old dispensation without something that corresponds to equilibrium.  An architect who should boastingly discard the law of gravitation in favor of a different theory would stand little chance of being intrusted with the construction of a palace of peace.  Similarly, a statesman who, while proclaiming that the era of wars is not yet over, would deprive of strategic frontiers the pivotal states of Europe which are most exposed to sudden attack would deserve to find few disciples and fewer clients.  Yet that was what Mr. Wilson aimed at and what some of his friends affirm he has achieved.  His foreign colleagues re-echoed his dogmas after having emasculated them.  It was instructive and unedifying to watch how each of the delegates, when his own country’s turn came to be dealt with on the new lines, reversed his tactics and, sacrificing sound to substance, insisted on safeguards, relied on historic rights, invoked economic requirements, and appealed to common sense, but all the while loyally abjured “territorial equilibrium” and “strategic guarantees.”  Hence the fierce struggles which MM.  Orlando, Dmowski, Bratiano, Venizelos, and Makino had to carry on with the chief of that state which is the least interested in European affairs in order to obtain all or part of the territories which they considered indispensable to the security and well-being of their respective countries.

At the outset Mr. Wilson stood for an ideal Europe of a wholly new and undefined type, which would have done away with the need for strategic frontiers.  Its contours were vague, for he had no clear mental picture of the concrete Europe out of which it was to be fashioned.  He spoke, indeed, and would fain have acted, as though the old Continent were like a thinly inhabited territory of North America fifty years ago, unencumbered by awkward survivals of the past and capable of receiving any impress.  He seemingly took no account of its history, its peoples, or their interests and strivings.  History shared the fate of Kolchak’s government and the Ukraine; it was not recognized by the delegates.  What he brought to Europe from America was an abstract idea, old and European, and at first his foreign colleagues treated it as such.  Some of them had actually sneered at it, others had damned it with faint praise,