It proved an irresistible combination, and once more Mr. George’s political instinct was not at fault.  No candidate could safely denounce this program, and none did so.  The old Liberal Party, having nothing comparable to offer to the electorate, was swept out of existence.[101] A new House of Commons came into being, a majority of whose members had pledged themselves to a great deal more than the Prime Minister’s guarded promises.  Shortly after their arrival at Westminster I asked a Conservative friend, who had known previous Houses, what he thought of them.  “They are a lot of hard-faced men,” he said, “who look as if they had done very well out of the war.”

This was the atmosphere in which the Prime Minister left for Paris, and these the entanglements he had made for himself.  He had pledged himself and his Government to make demands of a helpless enemy inconsistent with solemn engagements on our part, on the faith of which this enemy had laid down his arms.  There are few episodes in history which posterity will have less reason to condone,—­a war ostensibly waged in defense of the sanctity of international engagements ending in a definite breach of one of the most sacred possible of such engagements on the part of victorious champions of these ideals.[102]

Apart from other aspects of the transaction, I believe that the campaign for securing out of Germany the general costs of the war was one of the most serious acts of political unwisdom for which our statesmen have ever been responsible.  To what a different future Europe might have looked forward if either Mr. Lloyd George or Mr. Wilson had apprehended that the most serious of the problems which claimed their attention were not political or territorial but financial and economic, and that the perils of the future lay not in frontiers or sovereignties but in food, coal, and transport.  Neither of them paid adequate attention to these problems at any stage of the Conference.  But in any event the atmosphere for the wise and reasonable consideration of them was hopelessly befogged by the commitments of the British delegation on the question of Indemnities.  The hopes to which the Prime Minister had given rise not only compelled him to advocate an unjust and unworkable economic basis to the Treaty with Germany, but set him at variance with the President, and on the other hand with competing interests to those of France and Belgium.  The clearer it became that but little could be expected from Germany, the more necessary it was to exercise patriotic greed and “sacred egotism” and snatch the bone from the juster claims and greater need of France or the well-founded expectations of Belgium.  Yet the financial problems which were about to exercise Europe could not be solved by greed.  The possibility of their cure lay in magnanimity.