“But parallel with the Conference and the daily lectures which its members are receiving on geography, ethnography, and history there are other councils at work, some publicly, others privately, which represent the vast masses who are in a greater hurry than the political world to have their urgent wants supplied.  For they are the millions of Europe’s inhabitants who care little about strategic frontiers and much about life’s necessaries which they find it increasingly difficult to obtain.  Only a visitor from a remote planet could fully realize the significance of the bewildering phenomena that meet one’s gaze here every day without exciting wonder....  The sprightly people who form the rind of the politico-social world ... are wont to launch winged words and coin witty epigrams when characterizing what they irreverently term the efforts of the Peace Conference to square the circle; they contrast the noble intentions of the delegates with the grim realities of the workaday world, which appear to mock their praiseworthy exertions.  They say that there never were so many wars as during the deliberations of these famous men of peace.  Hard fighting is going on in Siberia; victories and defeats have just been reported from the Caucasus; battles between Bolshevists and peace-lovers are raging in Esthonia; blood is flowing in streams in the Ukraine; Poles and Czechs have only now signed an agreement to sheath swords until the Conference announces its verdict; the Poles and the Germans, the Poles and the Ukrainians, the Poles and the Bolshevists, are still decimating each other’s forces on territorial fragments of what was once Russia, Germany, or Austria.”

Sinister rumors were spread from time to time in Paris, London, and elsewhere, which, wherever they were credited, tended to shake public confidence not only in the dealings of the Supreme Council with the smaller countries, but also in the nature of the occult influences that were believed to be occasionally causing its decisions to swerve from the orthodox direction.  And these reports were believed by many even in Conference circles.  Time and again I was visited by delegates complaining that this or that decision was or would be taken in response to the promptings not of land-grabbing governments, but of wealthy capitalists or enterprising captains of industry.  “Why do you suppose that there is so much talk now of an independent little state centering around Klagenfurt?” one of them asked me.  “I will tell you:  for the sake of some avaricious capitalists.  Already arrangements are being pushed forward for the establishment of a bank of which most of the shares are to belong to X.”  Another said:  “Dantzig is needed for politico-commercial reasons.  Therefore it will not be made part of Poland.[106] Already conversations have begun with a view to giving the ownership of the wharves and various lucrative concessions to English-speaking pioneers of industry.  If the city were Polish no such liens could be held on it because the state would provide everything needful and exploit its resources.”  The part played in the Banat Republic by motives of a money-making character is described elsewhere.