mise, so valuable in vulgar politics, but so
perilous in embodying ideals. Anxious to reach unanimous decisions even
when unanimity was lacking, the principal statesmen boldly had recourse
to ingenious formulas and provisional agreements, which each party might
construe in its own way, and paid scant attention to what was going on
outside. I wrote at the time:[105]

"But parallel with the Conference and the daily lectures which its
members are receiving on geography, ethnography, and history there are
other councils at work, some publicly, others privately, which represent
the vast masses who are in a greater hurry than the political world to
have their urgent wants supplied. For they are the millions of Europe's
inhabitants who care little about strategic frontiers and much about
life's necessaries which they find it increasingly difficult to obtain.
Only a visitor from a remote planet could fully realize the significance
of the bewildering phenomena that meet one's gaze here every day without
exciting wonder.... The sprightly people who form the rind of the
politico-social world ... are wont to launch winged words and coin witty
epigrams when characterizing what they irreverently term the efforts of
the Peace Conference to square the circle; they contrast the noble
intentions of the delegates with the grim realities of the workaday
world, which appear to mock their praiseworthy exertions. They say that
there never were so many wars as during the deliberations of these
famous men of peace. Hard fighting is going on in Siberia; victories and
defeats have just been reported from the Caucasus; battles between
Bolshevists and peace-lovers are raging in Esthonia; blood is flowing in
streams in the Ukraine; Poles and Czechs have only now signed an
agreement to sheath swords until the Conference announces its verdict;
the Poles and the Germans, the Poles and the Ukrainians, the Poles and
the Bolshevists, are still decimating each other's forces on territorial
fragments of what was once Russia, Germany, or Austria."

Sinister rumors were spread from time to time in Paris, London, and
elsewhere, which, wherever they were credited, tended to shake public
confidence not only in the dealings of the Supreme Council with the
smaller countries, but also in the nature of the occult influences that
were believed to be occasionally causing its decisions to swerve from
the orthodox direction. And these reports were believed by many even