sis not contests about mere
abstractions. Beneath the high-sounding principles and far-resonant
reforms which were propounded but not realized lurked concrete racial
strivings which a patriotic temper and robust faith might easily
identify with the highest interests of humanity.

When the future historian defines, as he probably will, the main result
of the Conference's labors as a tendency to place the spiritual and
political direction of the world in the hands of the Anglo-Saxon race,
it is essential to a correct view of things that he should not regard
this trend as the outcome of a deliberate concerted policy. It was
anything but this. Nobody who conversed with the statesmen before and
during the Conference could detect any sure tokens of such ultimate
aims, nor, indeed, of a thorough understanding of the lesser problems to
be settled. Circumstance led, and the statesmen followed. The historian
may term the process drift, and the humanitarian regret that such
momentous issues should ever have been submitted to a body of uninformed
politicians out of touch with the people for whose behoof they claimed
to be legislating. To liquidate the war should have been the first, as
it was the most urgent, task. But it was complicated, adjourned, and
finally botched by interweaving it with a mutilated scheme for the
complete readjustment of the politico-social forces of the planet. The
result was a tangled skein of problems, most of them still unsolved, and
some insoluble by governments alone. Out of the confusion of clashing
forces towered aloft the two dominant Powers who command the economic
resources of the world, and whose democratic institutions and internal
ordering are unquestionably more conducive to the large humanitarian end
than those of any other, and gradually their overlordship of the world
began to assert itself. But this tendency was not the outcome of
deliberate endeavor. Each representative of those vast states was
solicitous in the first place about the future of his own country, and
then about the regeneration of the human race. One would like to be able
to add that all were wholly inaccessible to the promptings of party
interests and personal ambitions.

Planlessness naturally characterized the exertions of the Anglo-Saxon
delegates from start to finish. It is a racial trait. Their hosts, who
were experts in the traditions of diplomacy, had before the opening of
the Conference prepared a plan for their beh