t gallery of treaty-makers Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Wilson
focussed the "fierce light" that beat about the proceedings. But it was
Smuts, in the shadow, who contributed largely to the mental power-plant
that drove the work. Lloyd George had to consider the chapter he wrote
in the great instrument as something in the nature of a campaign
document to be employed at home, while Clemenceau guided a steamroller
that stooped for nothing but France. The more or less unsophisticated
idealism of Woodrow Wilson foundered on these obstacles.

Smuts, with his uncanny sense of prophecy, foretold the economic
consequences of the peace. Looking ahead he visualized a surly and
unrepentant Germany, unwilling to pay the price of folly; a bitter and
disappointed Austria gasping for economic breath; an aroused and
indignant Italy raging with revolt--all the chaos that spells "peace"
today. He saw the Treaty as a new declaration of war instead of an
antidote for discord. His judgment, sadly enough, has been confirmed. A
deranged universe shot through with reaction and confusion, and with
half a dozen wars sputtering on the horizon, is the answer. The sob and
surge of tempest-born nations in the making are lost in the din of older
ones threatened with decay and disintegration. It is not a pleasing
spectacle.

Smuts signed the Treaty but, as most people know, he filed a memorandum
of protest and explanation. He believed the terms uneconomic and
therefore unsound, but it was worth taking a chance on interpretation, a
desperate venture perhaps, but anything to stop the blare and bicker of
the council table and start the work of reconstruction.

At Capetown he told me that for days he wrestled with the problem "to
sign or not to sign." Finally, on the day before the Day of Days in the
Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, he took a long solitary walk in the
Champs Elysee, loveliest of Paris parades. Returning to his hotel he
said to his secretary, Captain E. F. C. Lane, "I have decided to sign,
but I will tell the reason why." He immediately sat down at his desk and
in a handwriting noted for its illegibility wrote the famous
memorandum.

III

What of the personal side of Smuts? While he is intensely human it is
difficult to connect anecdote with him. I heard one at Capetown,
however, that I do not think has seen the light of print. It reveals his
methods, too.

When the Germans ran amuck in 1914 Smuts was Minister of Defense of the
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