oof, which at the lowest
estimate would have connoted a vast improvement on their own desultory
way of proceeding. The French proposed to distribute all the preparatory
work among eighteen commissions, leaving to the chief plenipotentiaries
the requisite time to arrange preliminaries and become acquainted with
the essential elements of the problems. But Messrs. Wilson and Lloyd
George are said to have preferred their informal conversations,
involving the loss of three and a half months, during which no results
were reached in Paris, while turmoil, bloodshed, and hunger fed the
smoldering fires of discontent throughout the World.

The British Premier, like his French colleague, was solicitous chiefly
about making peace with the enemy and redeeming as far as possible his
election pledges to his supporters. To that end everything else would
appear to have been subordinated. To the ambitious project of a world
reform he and M. Clemenceau gave what was currently construed as a
nominal assent, but for a long time they had no inkling of Mr. Wilson's
intention to interweave the peace conditions with the Covenant. So far,
indeed, were they both from entertaining the notion that the two
Premiers expressly denied--and allowed their denial to be circulated in
the press--that the two documents were or could be made mutually
interdependent. M. Pichon assured a group of journalists that no such
intention was harbored.[91] Mr. Lloyd George is understood to have gone
farther and to have asked what degree of relevancy a Covenant for the
members of the League could be supposed to possess to a treaty concluded
with a nation which for the time being was denied admission to that
sodality. And as we saw, he was incurious enough not to read the
narrative of what had been done by his own American colleagues even
after the Havas Agency announced it.

To President Wilson, on the other hand, the League was the _magnum opus_
of his life. It was to be the crown of his political career, to mark the
attainment of an end toward which all that was best in the human race
had for centuries been consciously or unconsciously wending without
moving perceptibly nearer. Instinctively he must have felt that the
Laodicean support given to him by his colleagues would not carry him
much farther and that their fervor would speedily evaporate once the
Conference broke up and their own special aims were definitely achieved
or missed. With the shrewdness of an experi