aven on earth. But we observe that the Treaty itself is a good old
eighteenth-century piece, drawing its inspiration from mundane and
practical considerations, and paying a good deal more than lip service
to the principle of the balance of power."[372]

That is a fair estimate of the work achieved by the delegates. But they
sinned in their way of doing it. If they had deliberately and
professedly aimed at these results, and had led the world to look for
none other, most of the criticisms to which they have rendered
themselves open would be pointless. But they raised hopes which they
refused to realize, they weakened if they did not destroy faith in
public treaties, they intensified distrust and race hatred throughout
the world, they poured strong dissolvents upon every state on the
European Continent, and they stirred up fierce passions in Russia, and
then left that ill-starred nation a prey to unprecedented anarchy. In a
word, they gathered up all the widely scattered explosives of
imperialism, nationalism, and internationalism, and, having added to
their destructiveness, passed them on to the peoples of the world as
represented by the League of Nations. Some of them deplored the mess in
which they were leaving the nations, without, however, admitting the
causal nexus between it and their own achievements.

General Smuts, before quitting Paris for South Africa, frankly admitted
that the Peace Treaty will not give us the real peace which the peoples
hoped for, and that peace-making would not begin until after the signing
of the Treaty. The _Echo de Paris_ wrote: "As for us, we never believed
in the Society of Nations."[373] And again: "The Society of Nations is
now but a bladder, and nobody would venture to describe it as a
lantern."[374] The Bolshevist dictator Lenin termed it "an organization
to loot the world."[375]

The Allies themselves are at sixes and sevens. The French are suspicious
of the British. A large section of the American people is profoundly
dissatisfied with the part played by the English and the French at the
Conference; Italy is stung to the quick by the treatment she received
from France, Britain, and the United States; Rumania loathes the very
names of those for whom she staked her all and sacrificed so much; in
Poland and Belgium the English have lost the consideration which they
enjoyed before the Conference; the Greeks are wroth with the American
delegates; the majority of Russians literally