it was not only journalists who wrote as though a stream
of wealth were to be turned into these countries to fertilize industry
and commerce there and enable them to keep well ahead of their pushing
competitors. Responsible Ministers likewise hall-marked these forecasts
with their approval. Before the fortune of war had decided for the
Allies, the finances of France had sorely embarrassed the Minister, M.
Klotz, of whom his chief, M. Clemenceau, is reported to have said: "He
is the only Israelite I have ever known who is out of his element when
dealing with money matters." Before the armistice, M. Klotz, when
talking of the complex problem and sketching the outlook, exclaimed: "If
we win the war, I undertake to make both ends meet, far though they now
seem apart. For I will make the Germans pay the entire cost of the war."
After the armistice he repeated his promise and undertook not to levy
fresh taxation.

Thus, despite fitful gleams of idealism, the atmosphere of the Paris
Conclave grew heavy with interests, passions, and ambitions. Only people
in blinkers could miss the fact that the elastic formulas launched and
interpreted by President Wilson were being stretched to the
snapping-point so as to cover two mutually incompatible policies. The
chasm between his original prospects and those of his foreign associates
they both conscientiously endeavored to ignore, and after a time they
hit upon a _tertium quid_ between territorial equilibrium and a
sterilized league tempered by the Monroe Doctrine and a military
compact. This composite resultant carried with it the concentrated evils
of one of these systems and was deprived of its redeeming features by
the other. At a conjuncture in the world's affairs which postulated
internationalism of the loftiest kind, the delegates increased and
multiplied nations and states which they deprived of sovereignty and
yoked to the first-class races. National ambitions took precedence of
larger interests; racial hatred was raised to its highest power. In a
word, the world's state system was so oddly pieced together that only
economic exhaustion followed by a speedy return to militarism could
insure for it a moderate duration.

Territorial self-sufficiency, military strength, and advantageous
alliances were accordingly looked to as the mainstays of the new
ordering, even by those who paid lip tribute to the Wilsonian ideal. The
ideal itself underwent a disfiguring change in the process