ions received the right to be
represented. In this way the Committee of Eight was formed.[9] In Paris
discussion became to the full as lively, and on the first Saturday, when
the representatives of Belgium, Greece, Poland, and the other small
states delivered impassioned speeches against the attitude of the Big
Five they were maladroitly answered by M. Clemenceau, who relied, as the
source from which emanated the superior right of the Great Powers, upon
the twelve million soldiers they had placed in the field. It was
unfortunate that force should thus confer privileges at a Peace
Conference which was convoked to end the reign of force and privilege.
In Vienna it was different, but so were the times.

Many of the entries and comments of the chroniclers of 1815 read like
extracts from newspapers of the first three months of 1919. "About
Poland, they are fighting fiercely and, down to the present, with no
decisive result," writes Count Carl von Nostitz, a Russian military
observer.... "Concerning Germany and her future federative constitution,
nothing has yet been done, absolutely nothing."[10] Here is a gloss
written by Countess Elise von Bernstorff, wife of the Danish Minister:
"Most comical was the mixture of the very different individuals who all
fancied they had work to do at the Congress ... One noticed noblemen and
scholars who had never transacted any business before, but now looked
extremely consequential and took on an imposing bearing, and professors
who mentally set down their university chairs in the center of a
listening Congress, but soon turned peevish and wandered hither and
thither, complaining that they could not, for the life of them, make out
what was going on." Again: "It would have been to the interest of all
Europe--rightly understood--to restore Poland. This matter may be
regarded as the most important of all. None other could touch so nearly
the policy of all the Powers represented,"[11] wrote the Bavarian
Premier, Graf von Montgelas, just as the Entente press was writing in
the year 1919.

The plenipotentiaries of the Paris Conference had for a short period
what is termed a good press, and a rigorous censorship which never erred
on the side of laxity, whereas those of the Vienna Congress were
criticized without truth. For example, the population of Vienna, we are
told by Bavaria's chief delegate, was disappointed when it discerned in
those whom it was wont to worship as demigods, only mortals. "