was also bound to
be tragic, inasmuch as it must involve, not merely their own ambition to
live in history as the makers of a new and regenerate era, but also the
destinies of the nations and races which confidently looked up to them
for the conditions of future pacific progress, nay, of normal existence.

During the Conference it was the fashion in most European countries to
question the motives as well as to belittle the qualifications of the
delegates. Now that political passion has somewhat abated and the
atmosphere is becoming lighter and clearer, one may without provoking
contradiction pay a well-deserved tribute to their sincerity, high
purpose, and quick response to the calls of public duty and moral
sentiment. They were animated with the best intentions, not only for
their respective countries, but for humanity as a whole. One and all
they burned with the desire to go as far as feasible toward ending the
era of destructive wars. Steady, uninterrupted, pacific development was
their common ideal, and they were prepared to give up all that they
reasonably could to achieve it. It is my belief, for example, that if
Mr. Wilson had persisted in making his League project the cornerstone of
the new world structure and in applying his principles without favor,
the Italians would have accepted it almost without discussion, and the
other states would have followed their example. All the delegates must
have felt that the old order of things, having been shaken to pieces by
the war and its concomitants, could not possibly survive, and they
naturally desired to keep within evolutionary bounds the process of
transition to the new system, thus accomplishing by policy what
revolution would fain accomplish by violence. It was only when they came
to define that policy with a view to its application that their
unanimity was broken up and they split into two camps, the pacifists and
the militarists, or the democrats and imperialists, as they have been
roughly labeled. Here, too, each member of the assembly worked with
commendable single-mindedness, and under a sense of high responsibility,
for that solution of the problem which to him seemed the most conducive
to the general weal. And they wrestled heroically one with the other for
what they held to be right and true relatively to the prevalent
conditions. The circumstance that the cause and effects of this clash of
opinions and sentiments were so widely at variance with early
antic