om
Germany's orbit into that of Great Britain. In vain the friends of the
delegates declared that economic interests were not the mainspring of
their deliberate action and that nothing was further from their
intention than to angle for a mandate for those countries. The
conviction was deep-rooted in the minds of many that each of the Great
Powers was playing for its own hand. That there was some apparent
foundation for this assumption cannot, as we saw, be gainsaid. Widely
and unfavorably commented was the circumstance that in the heat of those
discussions at the Conference a man of confidence of the Allies put this
significant and impolitic question to one of the plenipotentiaries: "How
would you take it if England were to receive a mandate for Lithuania?"

"The Great Powers," observed the most outspoken of the delegates of the
lesser states, "are bandits, but as their operations are on a large
scale they are entitled to another and more courteous name. Their gaze
is fascinated by markets, concessions, monopolies. They are now making
preparations for a great haul. At this politicians cannot affect to be
scandalized. For it has never been otherwise since men came together in
ordered communities. But what is irritating and repellent is the perfume
of altruism and philanthropy which permeates this decomposition. We are
told that already they are purchasing the wharves of Dantzig, making
ready for 'big deals' in Libau, Riga, and Reval, founding a bank in
Klagenfurt and negotiating for oil-wells in Rumania. Although deeply
immersed in the ethics of politics, they have not lost sight of the
worldly goods to be picked up and appropriated on the wearisome journey
toward ideal goals. The atmosphere they have thus renewed is peculiarly
favorable to the growth of cant, and tends to accelerate the process of
moral and social dissolution. And the effects of this mephitic air may
prove more durable than the contribution of its creators to the
political reorganization of Europe. If we compare the high functions
which they might have fulfilled in relation to the vast needs and the
unprecedented tendencies of the new age with those which they have
unwittingly and deliberately performed as sophists of sentimental
morality and destroyers of the wheat together with the tares, we shall
have to deplore one of the rarest opportunities missed beyond retrieve."

In this criticism there is a kernel of truth. The ethico-social currents
to which