licted on the entire people as well as on their leaders, and what
form should be given to it, were among the questions confronting the
Secret Council, and they implicitly answered them in the way we have
seen.

People who consider the answer adequate and justified give as their
reason that it presupposes and attains a single object--the efficacious
protection of France as the sentinel of civilization against an
incorrigible arch-enemy. And in this they may be right. But if you
enlarge the problem till it covers the moral fellowship of nations, and
if you postulate that as a safeguard of future peace and neighborliness
in the world, then the outcome of the Treaty takes on a different
coloring. Between France and Germany it creates a sea of bitterness
which no rapturous exultation over the new ethical ordering can sweeten.
The latter nation is assumed to be smitten with a fell moral disease, to
which, however, the physicians of the Conference have applied no moral
remedy, but only measures of coercion, mostly powerful irritants. The
reformed state of Europe is consequently a state of latent war between
two groups of nations, of which one is temporarily prostrate and both
are naively exhorted to join hands and play a helpful part in an idyllic
society of nations. This expectation is the delight of cynics and the
despair of those serious reformers who are not interested politicians.
Heretofore the most inveterate optimists in politics were the
revolutionaries. But they have since been outdone by the Paris
world-reformers, who tempt Providence by calling on it to accomplish by
a miracle an object which they have striven hard and successfully to
render impossible by the ordinary operation of cause and effect. Thus
the Covenant mars the Treaty, and the Treaty the Covenant.

In Weimar and Berlin the Treaty was termed the death-sentence of
Germany, not only as an empire, but as an independent political
community. Henceforward her economic efforts, beyond a certain limit,
will be struck with barrenness, her industry will be hindered from
outstripping or overtaking that of the neighboring countries, and her
population will be indirectly kept within definite bounds. For, instead
of exporting manufactures, she will be obliged to export human beings,
whose intellect and skill will be utilized by such rivals of her own
race as vouchsafe to admit them. Already before the Conference was over
they began to emigrate eastward. And those w