time and labor if the delegates would receive our typewritten dissertations, read them quietly in their respective hotels, and endeavor to form a judgment on the data they supply.  Failing that, I should like at least to provide them with a criterion of truth, for after me will come an opponent who will flatly contradict me, and how can they sift truth from error when the winnow is wanting?  It is hard to feel that one is in the presence of great satraps of destiny, but I made an act of faith in the possibilities of genial quantities lurking behind those everyday faces and of a sort of magic power of calling into being new relations of peace and fellowship between individual classes and peoples.  It was an act of faith.”

If the members of the Supreme Council lacked the graces with which to draw their humbler colleagues and were incapable of according hospitality to any of the more or less revolutionary ideas floating in the air, they were also utterly powerless to enforce their behests in eastern Europe against serious opposition.  Thus, although they kept considerable Inter-Allied forces in Germany, they failed to impose their decrees there, notwithstanding the circumstance that Germany was disorganized, nearly disarmed, and distracted by internal feuds.  The Conference gave way when Germany refused to let the Polish troops disembark at Dantzig, although it had proclaimed its resolve to insist on their using that port.  It allowed Odessa to be evacuated and its inhabitants to be decimated by the bloodthirsty Bolsheviki.  It ordered the Ukrainians and the Poles to cease hostilities,[103] but hostilities went on for months afterward.  An American general was despatched to the warring peoples to put an end to the fighting, but he returned despondent, leaving things as he had found them.  General Smuts was sent to Budapest to strike up an agreement with Kuhn and the Magyar Bolshevists, but he, too, came back after a fruitless conversation.  The Supreme Council’s writ ran in none of those places.

About March 19th the Inter-Allied commission gave Erzberger twenty-four hours in which to ratify the convention between Germany and Poland and to carry out the conditions of the armistice.  But Erzberger declined to ratify it and the Allies were unable or unwilling to impose their will on him.  From this state of things the Rumanian delegates drew the obvious corollary.  Exasperated by the treatment they received, they quitted the Conference, pursued their own policy, occupied Budapest, presented their own peace conditions to Hungary, and relegated, with courteous phrases and a polite bow to the Council, the directions elaborated for their guidance to the region of pious counsels.