if verbal exhortations and arguments could have done it.  The only kind of fresh attempt, which after the failure of those two experiments could fairly lay claim to universal sympathy, was one which should withdraw the proposed politico-social rearrangement from the domain alike of rhetoric and of empiricism and substitute a thorough systematic reform covering all the aspects of international intercourse, including all the civilized peoples on the globe, harmonizing the vital interests of these and setting up adequate machinery to deal with the needs of this enlarged and unified state system.  And it would be fruitless to seek for this in Mr. Wilson’s handiwork.  Indeed, it is hardly too much to affirm that empiricism and opportunism were among the principal characteristics of his policy in Paris, and that the outcome was what it must be.

Disputes and delays being inevitable, the Conference began its work at leisure and was forced to terminate it in hot haste.  Having spent months chaffering, making compromises, and unmaking them again while the peoples of the world were kept in painful suspense, all of them condemned to incur ruinous expenditure and some to wage sanguinary wars, the springs of industrial and commercial activity being kept sealed, the delegates, menaced by outbreaks, revolts, and mutinies, began, after months had been wasted, to speed up and get through their work without adequate deliberation.  They imagined that they could make up for the errors of hesitancy and ignorance by moments of lightning-like improvisation.  Improvisation and haphazard conclusions were among their chronic failings.  Even in the early days of the Conference they had promulgated decisions, the import and bearings of which they missed, and when possible they canceled them again.  Sometimes, however, the error committed was irreparable.  The fate reserved for Austria was a case in point.  By some curious process of reasoning it was found to be not incompatible with the Wilsonian doctrine that German-Austria should be forbidden to throw in her lot with the German Republic, this prohibition being in the interest of France, who could not brook a powerful united Teuton state.  The wishes of the Austrian-Germans and the principle of self-determination accordingly went for nothing.  The representations of Italy, who pleaded for that principle, were likewise brushed aside.

But what the delegates appear to have overlooked was the decisive circumstance that they had already “on strategic grounds” assigned the Brenner line to Italy and together with it two hundred and twenty thousand Tyrolese of German race living in a compact mass—­although a much smaller alien element was deemed a bar to annexation in the case of Poland.  And what was more to the point, this allotment deprived Tyrol of an independent economic existence, cutting it off from the southern valley and making it tributary to Bavaria.  Mr. Wilson, the public was credibly informed, “took this grave decision without having gone deeply into the matter, and he repents it bitterly.  None the less, he can no longer go back."[97]