the well-meant and well-advertised endeavors to substitute
a moral relationship of nations for the state of latent warfare known as
the balance of power were steadily wasted. On the one side the subtle
skill of Old World diplomacy was toiling hard and successfully to revive
under specious names its lost and failing causes, while on the other
hand the New World policy, naively ignoring historical forces and
secular prejudices, was boldly reaching out toward rough and ready modes
of arranging things and taking no account of concrete circumstances.
Generous idealists were thus pitted against old diplomatic stagers and
both secretly strove to conclude hastily driven bargains outside the
Council chamber with their opponents. As early as the first days of
January I was present at some informal meetings where such transactions
were being talked over, and I afterward gave it as my impression that
"if things go forward as they are moving to-day the outcome will fall
far short of reasonable expectations. The first striking difference
between the transatlantic idealists and the Old World politicians lies
in their different ways of appreciating expeditiousness, on the one
hand, and the bases of the European state-system, on the other hand. A
statesman when dealing with urgent, especially revolutionary,
emergencies should never take his eyes from the clock. The politicians
in Paris hardly ever take account of time or opportunity. The overseas
reformers contend that the territorial and political balance of forces
has utterly broken down and must be definitely scrapped in favor of a
league of nations, and the diplomatists hold that the principle of
equilibrium, far from having spent its force, still affords the only
groundwork of international stability and requires to be further
intensified."[104]

Living in the very center of the busy world of destiny-weavers, who were
generously, if unavailingly, devoting time and labor to the fabrication
of machinery for the good government of the entire human race out of
scanty and not wholly suitable materials, a historian in presence of the
manifold conflicting forces at work would have found it difficult to
survey them all and set the daily incidents and particular questions in
correct perspective. The earnestness and good-will of the
plenipotentiaries were highly praiseworthy and they themselves, as we
saw, were most hopeful. Nearly all the delegates were characterized by
the spirit of compro