roach to a guiding principle one can
find in his work at the Conference was the loosely held maxim that Great
Britain's best policy was to stand in with the United States in all
momentous issues and to identify Mr. Wilson with the United States for
most purposes of the Congress. Within these limits Mr. Lloyd George was
unyielding in fidelity to the cause of France, with which he merged that
of civilization.

M. Clemenceau is the incarnation of the tireless spirit of destruction.
Pulling down has ever been his delight, and it is largely to his success
in demolishing the defective work of rivals--and all human work is
defective--that he owes the position of trust and responsibility to
which the Parliament raised him during the last phase of the war.
Physically strong, despite his advanced age, he is mentally brilliant
and superficial, with a bias for paradox, epigram, and racy,
unconventional phraseology. His action is impulsive. In the Dreyfus days
I saw a good deal of M. Clemenceau in his editorial office, when he
would unburden his soul to M.M. Vaughan, the poet Quillard, and others.
Later on I approached him while he was chief of the government on a
delicate matter of international combined with national politics, on
which I had been requested to sound him by a friendly government, and I
found him, despite his developed and sobering sense of responsibility,
whimsical, impulsive, and credulous as before. When I next talked with
him he was the rebellious editor of _L'Homme Enchaine_, whose corrosive
strictures upon the government of the day were the terror of Ministers
and censors. Soon afterward he himself became the wielder of the great
national gagging-machine, and in the stringency with which he
manipulated it he is said by his own countrymen to have outdone the
government of the Third Empire. His _alter ego_, Georges Mandel, is
endowed with qualities which supplement and correct those of his
venerable chief. His grasp of detail is comprehensive and firm, his
memory retentive, and his judgment bold and deliberate. A striking
illustration of the audacity of his resolve was given in the early part
of 1918. Marshal Joffre sent a telegram to President Wilson in
Washington, and because he had omitted to despatch it through the War
Ministry, M. Mandel, who is a strict disciplinarian, proposed that he be
placed under arrest. It was with difficulty that some public men moved
him to leniency.

M. Clemenceau, the profession