r
after me will come an opponent who will flatly contradict me, and how
can they sift truth from error when the winnow is wanting? It is hard to
feel that one is in the presence of great satraps of destiny, but I made
an act of faith in the possibilities of genial quantities lurking behind
those everyday faces and of a sort of magic power of calling into being
new relations of peace and fellowship between individual classes and
peoples. It was an act of faith."

If the members of the Supreme Council lacked the graces with which to
draw their humbler colleagues and were incapable of according
hospitality to any of the more or less revolutionary ideas floating in
the air, they were also utterly powerless to enforce their behests in
eastern Europe against serious opposition. Thus, although they kept
considerable Inter-Allied forces in Germany, they failed to impose their
decrees there, notwithstanding the circumstance that Germany was
disorganized, nearly disarmed, and distracted by internal feuds. The
Conference gave way when Germany refused to let the Polish troops
disembark at Dantzig, although it had proclaimed its resolve to insist
on their using that port. It allowed Odessa to be evacuated and its
inhabitants to be decimated by the bloodthirsty Bolsheviki. It ordered
the Ukrainians and the Poles to cease hostilities,[103] but hostilities
went on for months afterward. An American general was despatched to the
warring peoples to put an end to the fighting, but he returned
despondent, leaving things as he had found them. General Smuts was sent
to Budapest to strike up an agreement with Kuhn and the Magyar
Bolshevists, but he, too, came back after a fruitless conversation. The
Supreme Council's writ ran in none of those places.

About March 19th the Inter-Allied commission gave Erzberger twenty-four
hours in which to ratify the convention between Germany and Poland and
to carry out the conditions of the armistice. But Erzberger declined to
ratify it and the Allies were unable or unwilling to impose their will
on him. From this state of things the Rumanian delegates drew the
obvious corollary. Exasperated by the treatment they received, they
quitted the Conference, pursued their own policy, occupied Budapest,
presented their own peace conditions to Hungary, and relegated, with
courteous phrases and a polite bow to the Council, the directions
elaborated for their guidance to the region of pious counsels.

In these ways