In these ways the well-meant and well-advertised endeavors to substitute a moral relationship of nations for the state of latent warfare known as the balance of power were steadily wasted.  On the one side the subtle skill of Old World diplomacy was toiling hard and successfully to revive under specious names its lost and failing causes, while on the other hand the New World policy, naively ignoring historical forces and secular prejudices, was boldly reaching out toward rough and ready modes of arranging things and taking no account of concrete circumstances.  Generous idealists were thus pitted against old diplomatic stagers and both secretly strove to conclude hastily driven bargains outside the Council chamber with their opponents.  As early as the first days of January I was present at some informal meetings where such transactions were being talked over, and I afterward gave it as my impression that “if things go forward as they are moving to-day the outcome will fall far short of reasonable expectations.  The first striking difference between the transatlantic idealists and the Old World politicians lies in their different ways of appreciating expeditiousness, on the one hand, and the bases of the European state-system, on the other hand.  A statesman when dealing with urgent, especially revolutionary, emergencies should never take his eyes from the clock.  The politicians in Paris hardly ever take account of time or opportunity.  The overseas reformers contend that the territorial and political balance of forces has utterly broken down and must be definitely scrapped in favor of a league of nations, and the diplomatists hold that the principle of equilibrium, far from having spent its force, still affords the only groundwork of international stability and requires to be further intensified."[104]

Living in the very center of the busy world of destiny-weavers, who were generously, if unavailingly, devoting time and labor to the fabrication of machinery for the good government of the entire human race out of scanty and not wholly suitable materials, a historian in presence of the manifold conflicting forces at work would have found it difficult to survey them all and set the daily incidents and particular questions in correct perspective.  The earnestness and good-will of the plenipotentiaries were highly praiseworthy and they themselves, as we saw, were most hopeful.  Nearly all the delegates were characterized by the spirit of compromise, so valuable in vulgar politics, but so perilous in embodying ideals.  Anxious to reach unanimous decisions even when unanimity was lacking, the principal statesmen boldly had recourse to ingenious formulas and provisional agreements, which each party might construe in its own way, and paid scant attention to what was going on outside.  I wrote at the time:[105]