s, survivals from the past, started up
at every hand's turn and greeted one with smiles or sighs. Men on whom I
last set eyes when we were boys at school, playing football together in
the field or preparing lessons in the school-room, would stop me in the
street on their way to represent nations or peoples whose lives were out
of chime, or to inaugurate the existence of new republics. One face I
shall never forget. It was that of the self-made temporary dictator of a
little country whose importance was dwindling to the dimensions of a
footnote in the history of the century. I had been acquainted with him
personally in the halcyon day of his transient glory. Like his
picturesque land, he won the immortality of a day, was courted and
subsidized by competing states in turn, and then suddenly cast aside
like a sucked orange. Then he sank into the depths of squalor. He was
eloquent, resourceful, imaginative, and brimful of the poetry of
untruth. One day through the asphalt streets of Paris he shuffled along
in the procession of the doomed, with wan face and sunken eyes, wearing
a tragically mean garb. And soon after I learned that he had vanished
unwept into eternal oblivion.

An Arabian Nights touch was imparted to the dissolving panorama by
strange visitants from Tartary and Kurdistan, Korea and Aderbeijan,
Armenia, Persia, and the Hedjaz--men with patriarchal beards and
scimitar-shaped noses, and others from desert and oasis, from Samarkand
and Bokhara. Turbans and fezzes, sugar-loaf hats and headgear resembling
episcopal miters, old military uniforms devised for the embryonic armies
of new states on the eve of perpetual peace, snowy-white burnooses,
flowing mantles, and graceful garments like the Roman toga, contributed
to create an atmosphere of dreamy unreality in the city where the
grimmest of realities were being faced and coped with.

Then came the men of wealth, of intellect, of industrial enterprise, and
the seed-bearers of the ethical new ordering, members of economic
committees from the United States, Britain, Italy, Poland, Russia,
India, and Japan, representatives of naphtha industries and far-off coal
mines, pilgrims, fanatics, and charlatans from all climes, priests of
all religions, preachers of every doctrine, who mingled with princes,
field-marshals, statesmen, anarchists, builders-up, and pullers-down.
All of them burned with desire to be near to the crucible in which the
political and social systems of