conception of their deserts was not wholly new. Soon after their
defection, and when the Allies were plunged in the depths of
despondency, a current of opinion made itself felt among certain
sections of the Allied peoples tending to the conclusion of peace on the
basis of compensations to Germany, to be supplied by the cession of
Russian territory. This expedient was advocated by more than one
statesman, and was making headway when fresh factors arose which bade
fair to render it needless.

At the Paris Conference the spirit of this conception may still have
survived and prompted much that was done and much that was left
unattempted. Russia was under a cloud. If she was not classed as an
enemy she was denied the consideration reserved for the Allies and the
neutrals. Her integrity was a matter of indifference to her former
friends; almost every people and nationality in the Russian state which
asked for independence found a ready hearing at the Supreme Council. And
some of them before they had lodged any such claim were encouraged to
lose no time in asking for separation. In one case a large sum of money
and a mission were sent to "create the independent state of the
Ukraine," so impatient were peoples in the West to obtain a substitute
for the Russian ally whom they had lost in the East, and great was their
consternation when their proteges misspent the funds and made common
cause with the Teutons.

Disorganized Russia was in some ways a godsend to the world's
administrators in Paris. To the advocate of alliances, territorial
equilibrium, and the old order of things it offered a facile means of
acquiring new helpmates in the East by emancipating its various peoples
in the name of right and justice. It held out to the capitalists who
deplored the loss of their milliards a potential source whence part of
that loss might be made good.[128] To the zealots of the League of
Nations it offered an unresisting body on which all the requisite
operations from amputation to trepanning might be performed without the
use of anesthetics.

The various border states of Russia were thus quietly lopped off without
even the foreknowledge, much less the assent, of the patient, and
without any pretense at plebiscites. Finland, Esthonia, Latvia, Georgia
were severed from the chaotic Slav state offhandedly, and the warrant
was the doctrine propounded by President Wilson--that every people shall
be free to choose its own mode of living and