that he had not seen where he was going, but his frequent irritation
was the sign of his distress. Still, in the ship-wreck of his whole
programme, he had succeeded in saving one thing, the Statute of the
League of Nations which was to be prefaced to all the treaties.
He wanted to go back to America and meet the Senate with at least
something to show as a record of the great undertaking, and he hoped
and believed in good faith that the Covenant of the League of Nations
would sooner or later have brought about agreement and modified the
worst of the mistakes made. His conception of things was academic,
and he had not realized that there was need to constitute the nations
before laying down rules for the League; he trusted that bringing them
together with mutual pledges would further most efficiently the cause
of peace among the peoples. On the other hand, there was diffidence,
shared by both, between Wilson and Lloyd George, and there was little
likelihood of the British Prime Minister's move checking the course
the Conference had taken.

Italy might have done a great work if its representatives had had
a clear policy. But, as M. Tardieu says, they had no share in the
effective doings of the Conference, and their activity was almost
entirely absorbed in the question of Fiume. The Conference was a
three-sided conversation between Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd George,
and the latter had hostility and diffidence on each side of him, with
Italy--as earlier stated--for the most part absent. Also, it was
just then that the divergence between Wilson and the Italian
representatives reached its acute stage. The essential parts of the
treaty were decided in April and the beginning of May, on April 22
the question of the right bank of the Rhine, on the 23rd or 24th the
agreement about reparations. Italy was absent, and when the Italian
delegates returned to Paris without being asked on May 6, the text of
the treaty was complete, in print. In actual fact, only one person did
really effective work and directed the trend of the Conference, and
that person was Clemenceau.

The fact that the Conference met in Paris, that everything that was
done by the various delegations was known, even foreseen so that
it could be opposed, discredited, even destroyed by the Press
beforehand--a thing which annoyed Lloyd George so much that at one
time he thought seriously of leaving the Conference--all this gave
an enormous advantage to the French de