ipations had its roots partly in their limited survey of the
complex problem, and partly, too, in its overwhelming vastness and their
own unfitness to cope with it.

The delegates who aimed at disarmament and a society of pacific peoples
made out as good a case--once their premises were admitted--as those who
insisted upon guarantees, economic and territorial. Everything depended,
for the theory adopted, upon each individual's breadth of view, and for
its realization upon the temper of the peoples and that of their
neighbors. As under the given circumstances either solution was sure to
encounter formidable opposition, which only a doughty spirit would dare
to affront, compromise, offering a side-exit out of the quandary, was
avidly taken. In this way the collective sagacities, working in
materials the nature of which they hardly understood, brought forth
strange products. Some of the incongruities of the details, such, for
instance, as the invitation to Prinkipo, despatched anonymously,
occasionally surpass satire, but their bewildered authors are entitled
to the benefit of extenuating circumstances.

On the momentous issue of a permanent peace based on Mr. Wilson's
pristine concept of a league of nations, and in accordance with rigid
principles applied equally to all the states, there was no discussion.
In other words, it was tacitly agreed that the fourteen points should
not form a bar to the vital postulates of any of the Great Powers. It
was only on the subject of the lesser states and the equality of nations
that the debates were intense, protracted, and for a long while
fruitless. At times words flamed perilously high. For months the
solutions of the Adriatic, the Austrian, Turkish, and Thracian problems
hung in poignant suspense, the public looking on with diminishing
interest and waxing dissatisfaction. The usual optimistic assurances
that all would soon run smoothly and swiftly fell upon deaf ears. Faith
in the Conference was melting away.

The plight of the Supreme Council and the vain exhortations to believe
in its efficiency reminded me of the following story.

A French parish priest was once spiritually comforting a member of his
flock who was tormented by doubts about the goodness of God as measured
by the imperfection of His creation. Having listened to a vivid account
of the troubled soul's high expectation of its Maker and of its deep
disappointment at His work, the pious old cure said: "Yes, my chil