A friend and adviser of President Wilson publicly affirmed that the Fiume problem was twice on the point of being settled satisfactorily for all parties, when the representatives of commercial interests cleverly interposed their influence and prevented the scheme from going through in the Conference.  I met some individuals who had been sent on a secret mission to have certain subjects taken into consideration by the Supreme Council, and a man was introduced to me whose aim was to obtain through the Conference a modification of financial legislation respecting the repayment of debts in a certain republic of South America.  This optimist, however, returned as he had come and had nothing to show for his plans.  The following significant passage appeared in a leading article in the principal American journal published in Paris[107] on the subject of the Prinkipo project and the postponement of its execution: 

“From other sources it was learned that the doubts and delays in the matter are not due so much to the declination [sic] of several of the Russian groups to participate in a conference with the Bolshevists, but to the pulling against one another of the several interests represented by the Allies.  Among the Americans a certain very influential group backed by powerful financial interests which hold enormously rich oil, mining, railway, and timber concessions, obtained under the old regime, and which purposes obtaining further concessions, is strongly in favor of recognizing the Bolshevists as a de facto government.  In consideration of the visa of these old concessions by Lenin and Trotzky and the grant of new rights for the exploitation of rich mineral territory, they would be willing to finance the Bolshevists to the tune of forty or fifty million dollars.  And the Bolshevists are surely in need of money.  President Wilson and his supporters, it is declared, are decidedly averse from this pretty scheme.”

That President Wilson would naturally set his face against any such deliberate compromise between Mammon and lofty ideals it was superfluous to affirm.  He stood for a vast and beneficent reform and by exhorting the world to embody it in institutions awakened in some people—­in the masses were already stirring—­thoughts and feelings that might long have remained dormant.  But beyond this he did not go.  His tendencies, or, say, rather velleities—­for they proved to be hardly more—­were excellent, but he contrived no mechanism by which to convert them into institutions, and when pressed by gainsayers abandoned them.

An economist of mark in France whose democratic principles are well known[108] communicated to the French public the gist of certain curious documents in his possession.  They let in an unpleasant light on some of the whippers-up of lucre at the expense of principle, who flocked around the dwelling-places of the great continent-carvers and lawgivers in Paris.  His article bears this repellent heading:  “Is it true that English and American financiers negotiated during the war in order to secure lucrative concessions from the Bolsheviki?  Is it true that these concessions were granted to them on February 4, 1919?  Is it true that the Allied governments played into their hands?"[109]