can sentiment not at all. It should be observed however, that
behind the five official delegates there was a host of experts--military,
economic, legal and ethnological--some of whom did very important
service at the conference; and in the selection of this body no party
lines had been drawn.

On December 4 the President sailed from New York on an army transport,
accompanied by Mrs. Wilson and by a whole caravan of savants loaded
down with statistics and documents. He left a nation whose sentiment
was divided between sharp resentment and a rather apprehensive hope for
the best, but he landed on a continent which was prepared to offer to
Woodrow Wilson a triumphal reception such as European history had never
known. The six weeks between his landing at Brest and the opening of
the Peace Conference were devoted to a series of processions through
England, France and Italy, in which the Governments and the people
strove to outdo each other in expressing their enthusiasm for the
leader of the great and victorious crusade for justice and democracy.
Sovereigns spiritual and temporal and the heads of Governments heaped
him with all the honors in their power, and crowds of workingmen stood
for hours in the rain that they might see him for a moment at a
railroad station. Even from neutral Holland, divided Ireland and
hostile Germany came invitations to the President, and he would
probably have been received by those peoples as enthusiastically as by
British, French and Italians.

For the war had been ended on the basis of the ideals of President
Wilson. Those ideals had been expressed in vague and general terms, and
every Government thought that its own war aims coincided with them.
Every people, suddenly released from the long and terrible strain of
the war, thought that all its troubles were suddenly to be ended by the
principles of President Wilson. Jugo-Slavs and Italians claimed Istria
and Fiume, and each felt itself supported by the principles of
President Wilson. To Frenchmen those principles meant that Germany must
pay for the war forced on France, and to Germans they meant that a
ruined France and an uninvaded Germany could start again on the same
footing.

The Peace conference that began on January 18 was bound to disillusion
a great many people, including President Wilson himself. Principles had
to be translated into practice, and every effort to do so left one
party to the dispute, if not both, convinced that the pr